This past weekend the Bro had a fast run of luck with a chubby nymph. We're talking flyfishing here, not frolicking in bosky dell. The name of the nymph was Sweeney Todd. The Bro didn't remember where he got the fly -- he had two of them in his box -- but its name got me thinking about the colorful nomenclature of the equally colorful little tools of our trade, flyfishing.

Sweeney Todd, the man, was apparently fictional, and first appeared in English literature in the 19th century as a throat-cutting killer who met his end dangling from the Old Bailey's gibbet. Todd surfaced in a variety of media including film and television, and in a wonderfully gory Broadway musical by Stephen Sondheim, Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, starring Angela Lansbury and Len Carriou. Todd dispatched his victims with a straight razor as they sat in a barber chair, expecting a close shave but getting instead the mother of all shaving cuts.

And Sweeney Todd, the nymph? A simple black body, accented by a brilliant slash of shocking magenta at its throat. We don't know who created the fly, but it was obviously a flytyer with a literary bent and a finely tuned sense of humor.

Other fly names are equally evocative, though less bloody. Carrie Stevens, the legendary Upper Dam tyer, left us not only the Ghost series as part of her great legacy, but also the Colonel Bates, which took some nice fish at the dam as recently as last week. The colonel was a noted angler and a client of Carrie's, but we are told the first iteration of the fly was called Captain Bates, then Major Bates, until finally Bates and the fly achieved their highest rank.

The great flytyer Roy Steenrood of upstate New York created that indispensable dry fly, the Hendrickson, and named it after his fishing pal A.E. Hendrickson. The Quill Gordon takes its name from the first American saint of flyfishing, Theodore Gordon.

Another pattern found in virtually every flybox, the Adams (when I asked friend Bob Manning to name his five favorite flies, he said, "The first four are Adams") was tied by Michigander Len Halladay and named for his friend Charles Adams, who was doubtless as delighted by the honor as by the fly's year-round effectiveness.

The first Hornberg was tied by Wisconsin game warden Frank Hornberg. The Doc Spratley was named for a Mount Vernon, Washington dentist by his fly-tying pal Dick Prankard.

I have seen many mistaken references to the "Royal Wolf," dishonoring the late, great angler, guide, instructor and fly-tyer Lee Wulff, who created the series of deadly hair-winged flies that bear his name.

Sometimes as my fly drifts unmolested on the surface of pond or river, I can imagine the conversation down below, as, watching my fly go by, one trout says to another, "Would you look at that? A Royal Wulff! That is so yesterday. We're doing Hendricksons today."