Today's Washington Post sports section carries an article about a young man from Maine who is likely to be the first picked in the 2025 NBA draft. About the middle of the article, I noticed the sentence
His local high school, Nokomis Regional High, shares its name with a Native American character in a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem.
This I thought and think annoyingly coy. Was it Nokomis that carried the lanterns into the Old North Church tower to signal Paul Revere? Was Nokomis the caretaker at the Jewish cemetery at Newport?
Given that Nokomis appears first in the legends of the Ojibway, a nation that flourished far west of Maine, and that the legends were adapted by Longfellow for his poem Hiawatha, it is fair to suppose that "shares its name with" should be "takes its name from".
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