From: john.w.kennedy@gmail.com   
      
   On 2015-10-15 20:14:10 +0000, Dorothy J Heydt said:   
      
   > 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.   
      
   The cats in my life before Eleanor's doctor put the kibosh on 'em were   
   Balboa, Micki, Jennifer Juniper, and (the only one I named myself)   
   Molly Bloom.   
      
   --   
   John W Kennedy   
   "You can, if you wish, class all science-fiction together; but it is   
   about as perceptive as classing the works of Ballantyne, Conrad and W.   
   W. Jacobs together as the 'sea-story' and then criticizing _that_."   
     -- C. S. Lewis.  "An Experiment in Criticism"   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)