The name game

Posted 8/21/12

We have a new kitten, a bouncing, tail-chasing three month old “silver tabby,” now named Ralphie. He came to us from the litter of a friend’s cat after months of relentless sweet-talk and …

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The name game

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We have a new kitten, a bouncing, tail-chasing three month old “silver tabby,” now named Ralphie. He came to us from the litter of a friend’s cat after months of relentless sweet-talk and wheedling from my 13-year-old daughter.

He wasn’t always named Ralphie, but an R-starting name complemen-ted the names of our other two cats, named Rocket and Raven. (Giving your children names that all begin with the same letter is a practice I’ve never really liked, but it works well with animals.)

Our kitten came to us with the name Smushy, given by his original family, so it was hard at first to change it without feeling disloyal. My son called the kitten Smusal or Spotal or Spochel—something different every time. But it was the name Ralphie that finally stuck.

So—how do you name a pet? I have Facebook friends who have cats with self-explanatory names like Monster and Kelly Clarkson. I know a greyhound named Tantivy (an old English word meaning “a rapid gallop”). In high school I named some kittens we had Clyde, Roberta and Sondra after the characters in Theodore Dreiser’s novel “An American Tragedy.” And when I was a little girl I had Marigold, a sweet gray kitten, regrettably eaten by a raccoon.

Some people stick with the standards: Spot and Fluffy and Blackie (names based on physical appearance). My niece took that approach to the extreme when she named her cat “millions of hairs.”

However, the trend in naming pets has gone toward names that are used as contemporary human names, according to Adrian Franklin, a sociologist and author of the book “Animals and Modern Cultures.” Franklin says that the 1980s, a time when people increasingly had fewer kids and pets became more important in their lives, marked a turning point when pet names and human names became synonymous. According to current polls, names such as Bella and Molly are some of the most popular for both humans and pets.

I doubt the name Ralph will ever make a comeback, although records show that it was popular (within the top 30 names) from the 1870s to the 1920s. An old English name of German origin, the name Ralph has been around for thousands of years. And it calls to mind a mischievous little boy, which is what our Ralphie is.

As I write this, Ralphie is in high spirits. He is rambunctiously attacking my feet and tangling in the computer wires. He is an impish one. He marauds about the kitchen and leaps up onto the table. He dragged a used tea bag (I pretend they are on hold to make another cup of tea) under the kitchen table and attacked it. Now he smells herbal.

In case you were wondering: the top names for babies in 2015 were Jackson for boys and Sophia for girls, according to BabyCenter.com. Come to think of it, I know a dog named Sophie, too.

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