Nun who took her name from Saint Floradora [St. Fidgeta & Other Parodies, 77]; taught English at St. Sandra's College in Shoat, Iowa. She authored Lament for St. Floradora; also wrote commentary on namesake to The Compositor. After St. Floradora was removed from the Roll of Saints, the nun changed her name to Sister Dido.
Portion of Lament for St. Floradora
Hibernus, snudging o'er the glebe
Puts bugs to flight, and eke the grebe
For Clorabel, my shepherd maid
Had noiseless slipped through corny glade
Myers can only guess as to the A.R.G. in the Sister's name but reminds us that he and John (and Charlie, too) "were brought up in the era of the comic book, so the 'arg' might simply be the sound a comic book character emits when he is being strangled."
Hibernus is the Latin word for winter, notes Bowen. "The ancient name for Ireland actually had a W in the middle of it, written with a V in Latin, but the Romans confused this with their word for winter and thus came to know the island as Hibernia rather than Hivernia.
"Clorabel sounds like another of those generic shepherdess names from pastoral poetry. If it were Florabel it would mean beautiful flower, but I don't think Clor- has any special meaning. I do recall that cartoonists and suchlike were wont to give female characters improbable names like Chlorine, playing on the resemblance to the ending of a typical woman's name. Chlor- comes from a Greek word meaning greenish-yellow - possibly John saw a humorous point in this, but I think he just wanted to avoid a close echo with the name of his heroine."
Dido is an extremely unlikely name for anyone in a religious order to take. She would share the name with the Queen of Carthage. "She was abandoned by Aeneas when he left to found Rome," explains Myers. "A tragic heroine of several operas, she was notable in Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas and Hector Berlioz's Les Troyens."
