Book-Inspired Names for Dogs

[dirac]

A list of 140 names for our canine friends. Not sure I'd want to saddle a new puppy with "Havisham."

[Kathleen O'Connell]

Some of those names are pretty good (Ajax! On the short list for the next pupper!), but a lot of them are just not dog names.  KATniss? No. Just no. Mystique? Bovary? Now, Mewstique for a glamorous ball of white floof YouTube cat would be awesome ... and I suppose Mewstique's YouTube dog frenemy might be Bowvary.

Ok. I'll show myself out.

PS - Isn't naming your dog Cujo kind of like naming him Cerberus? 

[dirac]

Ajax is great and it also fits one of the recommendations for dog names, which is that it be short. (I remember the other as being that the name should end in a vowel.)

I don’t know why Lassie and Lady made the cut but Lad didn’t. Nobody at that site ever read “Lad: a Dog”??

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PS - Isn't naming your dog Cujo kind of like naming him Cerberus? 

Worse, I would think. Not everyone would get the Cerberus reference, but calling your puppy Cujo would be like the Seinfeld episode where Elaine's boyfriend has the same name as a serial killer.

[Quiggin]

It should be Miss Havisham rather than just plain Havisham – always waiting for something, a little like Odysseus's  dog, Argos. Moriarty is also significantly Sherlock Holmes' adversary. Of the Latins, Catullus would be a nice three syllable name (as would be Tacitus, or Tacita). And where is Asta, as in "and Asta as Asta" of "The Thin Man"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnWGRJkIRIw

(There's also the Cerberus associated with Cerberus Capital management company – guarding the Hades of money perhaps.)

Edited May 24, 2019 by Quiggin

[Kathleen O'Connell]

Ah, Asta! Portrayed by the inimitable wire-haired terrier, Skippy, who also portrayed Mr. Smith in "The Awful Truth" and George in "Bringing Up Baby." Skippy also portrayed Ragsy, Rex, Pom-Pom, Skipper, Habeus, and Mr. Atlas. 

Mr. Smith is an awesome dog name. And yes, it absolutely should be Miss Havisham.

 

 

[Kathleen O'Connell]

Tacita / Tacitus (Latin for "Silent") would be a pretty hilarious name for the yappy beagle that lives down the hall from me. 

[Quiggin]

Tacitus the historian was pretty yappy, sharp and staccato, though Tacita Dean the filmmaker is not. I was thinking that three syllable names for dogs are good for calling them home (I always liked the four part Greek Ach-il-lay-us for that) but one syllable names are better for disciplining. Miranda (Shakespeare), Florida (Jane Bowles) and Sidonie (Colette) might also be good choices.

[dirac]

Skippy was miscast, being neither female nor a Schnauzer. Still, a very capable performance.

[dirac]

This looks like good reading for dog lovers temporarily isolated with their canine chums.

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If our love is a response to the dog’s, so, in turn, is the dog’s love a response to ours. It is not true, as Ullman maintains, echoing the popular view, that dogs “offer unconditional love and loyalty, no matter how badly we behave”. It is possible, indeed horribly frequent, for people to forfeit a dog’s love. Those dull-eyed, mangy and broken animals whose owners chain them up and ignore them no longer love these people. It is true that dogs do not impose conditions on us, but this, as Scruton explains, is because they cannot do so, not because they generously refrain from doing so. For a similar reason, it is questionable for Alice Walker to praise her labrador, Marley, for “how swiftly she forgives me”. Marley neither forgives nor blames, for these are actions that presuppose a range of concepts – responsibility, intention, negligence and so on – that are not in her or any other dog’s repertoire. A term better than “unconditional” for characterizing a dog’s love might be “uncomplicated” or “unreflecting”, neither of which is intended to detract from what Lorenz called the “immeasurability” of this love.

 

[dirac]

Doggie drama at the White House continues:

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And while White House sources have placed blame on the president's protectors and claimed that 'everyone loves' Commander who is 'always so friendly', the victim on this occasion was not a gun-carrying member of the president's security detail but a groundskeeper.