From: mdhangton@gmail.com   
      
   William Vetter wrote:   
   > William Vetter wrote:   
   >> Do you think the choice of names for animal characters in literature are   
   >> more important than naming humans?   
   >>   
   >> For example in _Three Men in a Boat_, the characters' names are George,   
   >> Jerome, Harris, and Montmorency.   
   >>   
   >> Another thing that I notice is that civilians generally do not name their   
   >> pets the same way that authors do.   
   >>   
   >> There are many websites that claim to give the 10 or 20 most popular cat or   
   >> dog names.  Some of them allow visitors to add names to list to increase   
   >> the sampling, and this sort I feel is the most credible.  The name that's   
   >> always in the top three is Charlie.   
   >   
   > Let me try again...   
   >   
   > Mark Twain owned cats that he named Apollonaris, Beelzebub, Blatherskite,   
   > Zoroaster.   
   >   
   > I found a website named vetmd.com that had an automated page that asked   
   > viewers to add the names/gender of their cats & dogs...the sample size seems   
   > to have grown to more than 30,000, so I liked this one, although it seems to   
   > be down when I tried it a few days ago.  According to their list, the most   
   > popular name for a female cat is Angel, and the second most popular name for   
   > both male & female cats is Charlie.  Others in the top ten relate to patterns   
   > of the cats' coats:  Mittens, Tiger, Oreo...   
   >   
   > So you see what I'm getting at -- writers will approach the naming the same   
   > way they approach naming a fictional character, while the rest of humanity   
   > likely won't.   
      
   I found a book last month _The Cat Name Companion_.  It has lists in it   
   with entries like   
   Portland - for a cat the color of cement.   
   It's not much different.   
      
   In the public library, there is a book _Black American Names_, which is   
   a compilation and frequency analysis of freedmen's names that were   
   recorded in censuses in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and I think Savannah,   
   Georgia every 50 years or so from 1850 onward.  The book involved   
   reproductions of raw computer printouts from perhaps 1970. There were a   
   lot of unique names for example (men's names)   
   Reason   
   Messiah   
   Massadonia   
   Steptoe   
   Resin   
   Zeno   
   and, you know, these are the sort of names that excite writers.   
      
   But what I think was most important was (if I interpreted the units   
   this author expressed his data in, which were units of 11.6 persons or   
   something artifactual like that) that 40% of the men were named John in   
   1850.   
      
   Originally, I got into this question because I have a project that   
   involves a POV character who receives many lost cat flyers in his   
   mailbox.  I wrote text, and then later collected all of the cat names   
   together into a list of 20 or so, to see if some of them sounded too   
   much alike, began with the same letters, or whatever.  The problem is   
   that, in aggregate, all of them look unique, where, as I've said here   
   already, most cats have names like Tiger or Mittens or Blackie or   
   Orangie.  Similarly, a I said above, data suggests that slaves tended   
   to be named John or Joseph, where authors tend to avoid common names.   
      
   So, for what it's worth, here are my electrons.  Better than no   
   electrons, maybe.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)