From: djheydt@kithrup.com
In article ,
William Vetter wrote:
>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.
FWIW, my cats have been named Lox, Cream Cheese (our housemate
had a beagle named Bagel), One, Two, Three (Cream Cheese's
kittens, before we got her fixed), Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta,
Epsilon, Zeta (One's kittens, before we got *her* fixed),
Garfield, Danae, Promethea, Jean-Luc, Sable, Isolde, Seven
(short for "seven cats are too damn many; she was with us
for only about a week, because she was a lost, purebred,
expensive lavender-point Siamese and we managed to find her
human), Sebastian, Viola, Gwenwhyfar, Jasmine. Hal and I no
longer have cats, since we're old and if we got kittens they
might easily outlive us. Our daughter (in the upstairs flat) has
two young cats named Jenka and Gkika.
--
Dorothy J. Heydt
Vallejo, California
djheydt at gmail dot com
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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