What’s in a Name?
Some folks really like to name inanimate objects. This is Digby the toaster; that’s Fran the chaise longue. I can sort of get behind some of it: as mentioned in this week’s episode, naming cars makes a lot of sense to me. My mother had a car at one point in my childhood called Arthur, a dependable name that would get you out of a tight scrape - and he was red. A gallant car, chivalrous, keen to help a lady out of a tight spot: that sort of thing. My best friend’s car was Wally while we were at school, and it was an apt moniker, too. Wally was very sweet, tried hard, and sometimes wasn’t up to the task of making it through a southern Ontario winter without a little extra care. He wasn’t rough and tough: he was a bit timid, a bit in need of encouragement, which my friend usually offered by patting him lovingly on the dashboard and saying “Come on, Wally!” whenever he approached hills. Similarly, my father drove a large-ish sort of SUV for a long time, a big green behemoth I called Jimmy Hop Toad. This name was not universally adopted, but then, Jimmy did not often require support as Wally did.
But I do think you can take this sort of thing too far. My husband is a musician, and so I have encountered lots of folks who name their guitars, and this I find more difficult to swallow. Guitars are almost always named after women, which gets into yucky territory very quickly. When I have broached this opinion in the past, people will often clamour to tell me that the practice must be all right, because B.B. King named his beloved guitar Lucille. So he did. But the rest of us are not B.B. King, and so perhaps it is wise to leave the naming of instruments to the greats, and skip calling our many and varied guitars “Taloulah” or “Athena” or “Beryl” or what have you. One can take this sort of thing too far.
Relatedly, I am always on the search for good pet names. In many ways, they are deeply unused names. My cat’s name is Maebh, but I hardly ever call her that. More often than not, she is Brave Miss Maebh, Maebh-y Baby, Gremlin, Kitty, The Grey Lady, Ladygirl, Fluffbutt, or Principessa. I like Irish names for pets, but especially for cats. There is a certain impish quality that many cats possess which I feel is well encompassed in a name like Fionnukin or Aoife. But I admit that I am also charmed by the idea of a dog or cat named a perfectly normal human name - Kevin, Belinda, Eugene, Stephanie. Then one only has to wait for the perfect, delicious moment to announce that you are running late for work because “Kevin got stuck behind the fridge again” or “Stephanie jumped on me in the middle of the night”, and leave your listeners wondering about the strange, slightly inept roommate you seem to have acquired. If I’m honest though, dear reader, I’ll stick with the Irish names for the time being. They seem to suit well, and I do secretly enjoy a horrible satisfaction at watching the vet receptionist struggle through them a couple of times a year. And perhaps one day, if I am in a situation to own a car and give it a name, I might say airily to a friend that we were late getting Niamh to the vet because Gary just refused to start, and delight in their confusion. Otherwise, though, I think I’ll leave the inanimate objects in my life unnamed.
Jennifer