The Holm shipping company in New Zealand had the same style naming convention.
The Holmwood was sunk by German commerce raiders in the Pacific, my Mum did the the payroll for the Holmdale which ran the Lyttelton to Chatham Islands route for years before being sold, and sinking as the Celtic Kiwi. Then there was the Holmglen, the Holmlea, and a bunch of others I can't recall.
Likewise there was a shipping company that named all their RoRos the Spirit of X, where X was a liberal economics principle, so there was a Spirit of Free Enterprise, a Spirit of Competition, etc. Not sure if there was ever a Spirit of the Invisible Hand.
After a bit more research, I don't think so. Looks like the company only had the Free Enterprise and Competition and the Enterprise was built in 1968, earlier then the Herald.
I think that's a different Spirit. The NZ one was originally the Sealord Contender, which kinda sounds like she was built to fight the Greyjoys for control of the Iron Isles, but also, launched in 1968, earlier than the Herald et al.
In Standard American English true. There are many many dialects and local versions. Listen to the Great British Bakeoff for one full episode and note if you ever disagree with any pronunciations. Now go to Indonesia, where I spent a great deal of time and tell me that Cleaver is never pronounced Clever.
Well, Indonesian English wasn't an argument I was expecting. :D
I'm a Kiwi, we're renowned for butchering English.
Or as we call it, Unglush.
For some fun examples, here's a video made by Australians parodying our accent[0].
And here's another one[1], although what's funny as a Kiwi is to me it just sounds like Australians saying "deck", but to them it sounds like Kiwis saying "dick". But then once when I asked my friend's Australian partner to pass me a pen once, she was confused until I pronounced it (to me) as "peeen", which felt like I was taking the piss out of her accent, but she understood me then, she had thought I was asking for a pin...
Oh, and here's one from the Flight of the Conchords playing on our accent and American comprehension thereof.[2]
I've never heard cleaver pronounced "clever" (so far in my life), but then, lever is often pronounced here in a way that rhymes with "cleaver" (i.e., "leaver" vs. "lever") so I can entirely understand that the pronunciation of cleaver could change to clever in other countries' English.
They just informed you that in some places it does.
Specifically that both sound like kleh-ver not that both sound like klee-ver just to be clear, because as long as we're only writing text here and the very topic is ambiguity about how a word sounds, I notice that by the normal rules "clever" should be expected to sound like klee-ver, which starts to make this conversation a bit funny.
This is more a misunderstanding of how dialects work. There is no "English" if you consider British, Welsh, Scottish, and Australian English all English which most people do. There are even more extreme forms of English which all can be mutually intelligible with English, but sound very different. There is no one way to pronounce anything, except in a particular dialect.
http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better...
I doubt it was named by a fan, however.