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May I suggest that if you (by "you" I mean the parent and siblings of my comment) are going to speculate, you might consider reading the Wikipedia article before going off in all directions. It's even got sources for some of the claims (although not all).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#Name

I always thought the official name was "Practical Extraction and Report Language", or perl for short.

I think that's a backronym (albeit from L. Wall).

http://wordsmith.org/words/backronym.html

Supposedly, perl was originally pearl. Practical Extraction and Report Language. The 'a' got dropped because Larry wanted the name to be a four-letter word.

I thought it was "Perfect Emacs Rewriting Language".