One of my cats is Newman, after the Seinfeld character, and the other is Willis, from Different Strokes. People assume they’re named after actors Paul and Bruce.
Back in the very distant past when I could abide cats, before I became exclusively and totally a Dog Person, I had a cat named Boeing. So he did have the name of a famous person, but he wasn’t actually named after William Boeing. His name came from the fact that he carried his tail upright and the tip was bent directly forward, resembling the tail of a Boeing 707 with the distinctive spear-like appendage on its tail. I suppose I could have named him “707” but that would not have been dignified!
When I got a cat, shortly after separating from my ex-wife, it was because I wanted somebody to come home to.
So I named her Lucy, so I could yell out “Lucy, I’m home!” In a bad Cuban-American accent.
A week later, I adopted one of her kittens. Naturally, he became Ricky.
Since he doesn’t sing, do you sing to him? I now have “Yo Way Yo, Home Va-Ray, Yo Ay-Rah, Jerhume Brunnen-G” stuck in my head.
Absolutely! Modern, ancient, real, fictional, bring 'em on!
“Because Pepperidge Farm remembers!”
My cat’s name is Wowbagger, after the Infinitely Prolonged one.
My Wowbagger hurls random insults at whomever he encounters, saying things like “wow!” and “me wow!” and “braaaat!”
Does she Splain?
Meave the cat (that’s her in my avatar) is named for Irish novelist Maeve Binchy.
It was my partner’s idea.
(The misspelling is due to an error by the vet’ we first registered with.)
My daughter, who is a biologist, has a rabbit named after Thomas Huxley (Darwin’s Bulldog). We had a hamster a while ago named Hattie (after Hatshepsut, the female Pharoah).
I once had a cat who liked to drop things in his water bowl. Not food, but manmade things: keys, pens, anything he could pick up.
If I hadn’t already named him, I might have named him “Arch”, for Archimedes.
Yes, yes I do. And since I own the Tales from the Parallel Universe Soundtrack and have the full series on DVD, I’ll sometimes put on the “Brigadoon” episode and sing it was the Brunnen-C subbed in for him.
I want to, cat/lizard/snake-mom won’t let me. Which, I can almost, kinda get for cats who may or may not choose to respond to their names, but the snakes and lizards??? The best I’ve been able to do is add sub-names. Years ago I bought a chubby, well tempered Savannah monitor, who was outgrowing the local chain pet store they were in, who was a store favorite. His name was Ernie. Which is super bland and uninteresting for a stubby giant of a lizard. I wanted to name him Falstaff of Shakespeare fame. I was overruled, but it was agreed that he could be known as Ernie Fosselius Falstaff as a compromise. So he was still named after someone (in)famous for the first half, and someone fictionally famous at the end.
Other than calling Kai the Last of the Brunnen-C this has been my only success on the sub-naming front though.
My cat’s name is Nelson. Honestly that’s just what the shelter said his name was and I didn’t bother changing it, and I have no idea if he’s named after anyone in particular. But I like to tell people he’s named after Nelson Mandela.
When I was in high school we had a cat named Napoleon.
Huh. While our cats each have an official name on the vet’s paperwork, we each call them different things, and we don’t ask each other for permission. I call the white one Merry (or cat, or cutie pie, or cuddlepuss) but my daughter has been calling him Cookie. And Pippin is sometimes Pip or Pipster (or cat, or cutie, or …) Rachel seems to be migrating to “Ray Ray”, too.
We just adopted a cat and have tentatively named her Scout. She has been Scouting out her new home (which sounded nicer than snooping) but I wasn’t sure about it as a girl’s name. Then I looked up the one Scout I knew that was a girl, Atticus’s daughter, who is described as inquisitive, intelligent, and a tomboy, and I realized it’s a perfect fit. She’s a darkish grey with tuxedo patches of white.
Cats have three names (as T.S. Eliot noted).
Rikki is his official name. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi if you prefer*. But he also is Rufus, or Roofie. And his secret name, he alone only knows.
And our other cat is Becky or Rebecca if you prefer. Also Baby or Pretty Girl.
*NOT that Disney crap, but the real Jungle Book by Kipling.
From 1970 to 1982 Mrs. Cretin and I worked for Gracie (black-grey-white Tabby), who was named for both Ms. Allen and Ms. Slick.
My cat is named Atilla. Not for the Hun, actually, but for a cat in the comic strip Mother Goose and Grimm. I imagine that cat was named for the warrior.
Two juvenile cats adopted us many years ago. One had rather symmetrical black and grey markings, so he became Roarschach. The other was a lovely tortical (probably his sister) who had the classical Egyptian eye makeup, so she was Nefurtari (which I later learned translates to “beautiful companion”).
My parents had a brother-sister pair they named Romeo and Juliet. Always seemed kinda wrong…
And in the early 80s I adopted an orange barn kitten whom we named Pope Linus, but it didn’t stick and he quickly became just Garfield.