Angelus Mortem, Mortifer, or Letifer. If the cat was black I’d name it Snowball. If it was white I’d name it Midnight or Blackie.
Mochichidango
And because I love puns.
A long, long time ago I had twin orange boys who I named Sky and Andy. But all my friends called them That One and The Other One so that’s who they became. I could tell them apart but no one else could. It made for strange conversations when we talked about them. When I called to them, I’d just use Kitty and they would both come running. So they never really knew they had individual names.
I always wanted to call a pure black cat Spot. Then again, I want a whippet solely to name it Devo.
Mine is Nermal. Everyone ought to get the reference.
Clothilde was the name I wanted that was always vetoed. I’m not sure why I’m so enamored with it, but I get why it’s not everyone’s jam. When I met the first of my ferals and nobody but me cared if she had a name or not… of course she was Clothilde. The rest have French names as well and, for a few, I intentionally went for ones that I knew nobody else would agree to.
That’s the whole reason I ever started fostering: so that I could use all the names I wanted.
(not really. But it is a perk.)
As for puns- I got a foster dog once who was absolutely pathetic. Thin, scarred, with bad teeth, but most notably, mangy and missing most of her hair. So I named her Scarlett nO’Haira.
My current cats, Maine Coons, are Stevens and Ballou. Because cat.
A previous cat, because he was marmalade, was named Keillor.
Obscure literary reference?
In Mr. Mercedes, by Stephen King, the main antagonist invents two devices, one to change traffic lights, and one that can capture the radio signal from a key fob for locking and unlocking car doors.
He calls these devices Thing 1 and Thing 2.
I had wanted, for some time, to name a cat Merton or possibly Myrtle: because of course they’d get called Mert. And cats can say Mrrt.
Then in the middle of this past February, on a day with a weather forecast of below zero [F] that night, I opened the door to find a large young yellow cat mewing at me.
Three weeks later, nobody having answered multiple ads to claim him, and he having agreed to it, I had myself a Merton. Mrrt!
(I have named cats all sorts of things. Not going to go into the whole list – )
I had a couple of young cats choose me. One had large symmetrical marking in which I kept thinking I was seeing things, so I named him Roarschach. The other had Egyptian-looking eye makeup, so I named her after a real person who was in a novel I enjoyed, Nefurtari, which I later discovered translates, appropriately enough, to “beautiful companion”.
Our first cat was Pete - for Petronius the Arbiter. He never did find the Door Into Summer - though unlike his namesake, he never tried all that hard (he’d been a stray before he wound up at the animal shelter, so I think he knew he had it good with us).
The second cat helped evolve his own name: the people who “owned” (then abandoned!!!) him had apparently named him Sebastion. As he became ours, that evolved into Sebustian (not quite sure why) then Buster then Fuzz-Buster then Buzz-Fuster - because he purred like a sawmill. Mostly we called him Buster, though.
I have a hard time pre-naming animals, especially cats.
I have one who’s name in the vet’s files is Squeak, but we can’t seem to call her anything but Baby. (She was a teeny foundling, bottle-raised, and always referred to as The Baby. “Where’s The Baby?” “Have to get back in time to feed The Baby”)
I have also, in no particular order:
Mouse
Rose
George
Little
Lucy
Handsome
Chloe
Tux
Lily
Tonks
And in the barn, not named by me because they came with the property:
Duchess
Graycie
DK (Ditch Kitty) aka Deke
Barnie (who was Mouse, but I had a Mouse in the house, so he became Barnmouse, aka Barnie, Barn, Barnabas)
My husband just wants to name everything Bob, because he says it’s the only name he’s remember. I suspect the next cat will be Bob, regardless of gender … sigh …
Mousey Tongue or Meow Tse Tung
Hiss
My mom had a gray cat named Maggie, but I nicknamed her Spot. Partly because she was the most placid, mellow cat I’ve ever known, and when she curled up she was just a big, gray spot. And then I noticed that when she yawned I could see a gray spot on the roof of her mouth.
I also like David Mewer.
For a Siamese: Yowl Ming
More likely it was a reference to The Cat In The Hat.
I’ve posted this before, but my son already has a name for his first cat, when he is able to get one (he does have his own apartment now but it’s a no-pet building, alas):
Schismogenesis.
I like it, because it has a lot of possible nicknames more or less built in: Skizmo, Jenny, Mo, Sis, Moggie, Jean. And if the cat has a strong personality of some sort he’ll probably be able to work with it: Schismo-Machismo, for example.
Let’s see… One cat was named Beelzebeth because she wasn’t a bub. During her kittenhood I read Wee Free Men and started referring to her as the WEB [Wee Evil Beastie]. Later Roommate adopted a rescue named Mosaic who he promptly renamed Cupcake. That sounded too wimpy to me so I renamed her Cupcake the Destroyer. After she learned how to turn my CPAP machine off I started referring to her as a Homicidal Psycho Furbeast.
Our previous pair of ginger siblings were Mercury and Diana (as in the gods), named by our son when he was about 10. After Diana got pissed that we boarded her when we left town for a wedding and had a heart attack out of spite, we swore to wait a while before adopting another rescue.
We lasted a week. We got a tiny gray tom that the foster was calling Lil’ Dude, so he of course became Jeffrey Lebowski, AKA Jeff, or El Duderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.