I was able to access the full Kragh article (I have Jstor access!) – which seemed to interesting not to read – and pulled out five interesting nuggets (with the help of Gemini):

1. The Failed 1993 Renaming Competition

• In 1993, the astronomy magazine Sky and Telescope hosted a massive global competition to find a better, less bellicose name for the Big Bang theory.

• Despite receiving thousands of submissions, the judges ultimately rejected all of them.

"The panel of judges, consisting of astronomer Carl Sagan, television broadcaster Hugh Downs, and science writer Timothy Ferris, mulled over 13,099 suggestions from forty-one countries, only to decide that none of them were worthy of supplanting the misleading and 'inappropriately bellicose' name Big Bang."

2. The True Father of the Theory Preferred "Fireworks"

• Georges Lemaître, the Belgian physicist who originally proposed the explosive birth of the universe in 1931, never used the term "Big Bang".

• He also never used the popular phrase "cosmic egg," which was later falsely attributed to him.

"In his publications on cosmology Lemaître usually referred to his theory by these two names, primeval atom and fireworks. He never used the term Big Bang, nor did he use 'cosmic egg,' of which there are several later references, always without indication of a source."

3. "Big Bang" First Appeared in Meteorology, Not Cosmology

• Before Fred Hoyle applied the term to the origins of the universe, meteorologists used the phrase in the 1920s and 1940s to describe large explosions used for atmospheric studies.

"The first scientific paper with Big Bang in its title was a meteorological analysis of the winds caused by a five-thousand-ton TNT explosion that occurred in the spring of 1947 on the island of Helgoland."

4. George Gamow Actually Despised the Name

• George Gamow, a primary developer of the early hot universe model, is frequently and incorrectly credited with coining the term "Big Bang" to promote his theories.

• In reality, Gamow strongly disliked the name and actively avoided using it.

"'I don't like the word 'big bang," he said. 'I don't call it 'big bang,' because it is a kind of cliché.'"

5. The Name Was a "Slow Burn," Not an Instant Hit

• Even though Fred Hoyle coined the memorable term during a 1949 BBC radio broadcast, it was largely ignored by the scientific community for decades.

• It was only after the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation in 1965 that the theory—and eventually the name—began to gain serious traction.

"Contrary to what is often assumed, the name was not an instant success-it took more than twenty years before Big Bang became a household word in the scientific community."

I was curious as to what Fred Hoyle's actual beliefs were, and what his intentions were in using the phrase "Big Bang". Here's what the paper said (again, pulled out by Gemini):

1. He Believed in an Expanding Universe (The Steady State Theory)

Hoyle was a primary architect of the "steady state theory" of the universe. This theory absolutely accepted that the universe was expanding; however, it argued that the universe had no beginning and no end, and that it always looked the same on a large scale.

To explain how the universe could expand without emptying out or changing its average density, Hoyle and his colleagues proposed that new matter was constantly being created.

"According to this theory, although the universe was expanding, on a large scale it had always looked the same and would remain so. To make the constant average density of matter agree with the expansion, Hoyle and his two colleagues introduced the radical hypothesis of a continual and spontaneous creation of matter throughout space..."

2. He Rejected the "Point Origin" Idea, but He Wasn't Deriding It

Hoyle completely rejected the competing idea that the universe expanded from a single point in time, finding it unscientific. He stated in his 1949 BBC broadcast that he found this type of theory unacceptable "because the big bang creation process was 'irrational' and outside science".

However, the article explicitly refutes the popular myth that Hoyle coined "Big Bang" to mock or deride the theory. Instead, he created the term simply because he was on the radio and needed a vivid visual metaphor to help his listeners distinguish between his continuous creation theory and the explosive origin theory.

"In his works of 1949 and 1950 Hoyle certainly dismissed the idea of a sudden origin of the universe, but he did not describe it in ridiculing or mocking terms. In any case, with the later success of the big bang theory it became common to see Hoyle's neologism as an attempt to make the idea of an explosion universe... sound ridiculous. This is not how Hoyle saw it. At the time he seems to have considered it just an apt but innocent phrase for a theory he was opposed to..."

When asked in a 1989 interview about his invention of the phrase, Hoyle explained his true motivation:

"I was constantly striving over the radio-where I had no visual aids, nothing except the spoken word for visual images. And that seemed to be one way of distinguishing between the steady-state and the explosive big bang. And so that was the language I used."