According to vetstreet.com, the top ten female puppy names from 2012 include Bella, Daisy, Lucy, Molly, and Lola. Notice anything odd? They’re all human names! Gone are the days of pets named Fluffy and Pooch. In are the days of human children named after fruits and vegetables. In the Middle Ages, though, you might run into dogs that answer to Amiable, Trinket, Nosewise, Holdfast, and Clench. For more about pet ownership back then, check out historian Kathleen Walker Meikle’s book Medieval Pets. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Top Pet Names”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
One of the many joys of adopting a dog is coming up with a name for the animal.
And I have a list, Grant, of the top 10 puppy names for 2012.
Okay.
This is from the VetStreet.com website.
See if you notice anything about them.
For female dogs, we have Bella, Daisy, Lucy, Molly, and Lola.
And for male dogs, the top ones are Max, Buddy, Charlie, Rocky, and Cooper.
Anything strike you about all those names?
Not really.
What are you after?
I’m after the fact that they’re all human names.
Oh, of course.
You know, when I was young, I had a couple of dogs growing up, and one was named Traveler and one was named Tuffy.
But as an adult, I named them Alice and Lloyd and Lucy and Lily and Juan.
And I don’t know if that says anything about our relationship with doggies or not.
They’re increasingly a part of the family, not merely an animal.
Yeah, actually, William Sapphire did an informal survey of his readers and found that same thing back in the 1980s.
I wonder if that says something about us.
So cats aren’t fluffy anymore.
They’re Lily and Lola.
Well, it’s interesting. Cats are a little bit more inscrutable because among the top 10 names for cats are Kitty, Tiger, Tigger, and Smokey.
Okay.
I mean, maybe I’m making too much of that, but the reason I was thinking about this is I was reading a book called Medieval Pets.
It’s by Kathleen Walker-Michael, who’s a historian at the University of York in England.
And she talks about people who owned pets in the Middle Ages.
It was mostly women, mostly clerics, and then later scholars, often had small dogs.
And I was fascinated by some of the names that she includes in this book for dogs in the Middle Ages.
And here’s some examples.
Amiable.
Can you imagine going out into the street and saying, amiable?
Amiable.
Amiable.
And there’s also trinket and nosewise.
Oh, I like trinket.
You like trinket?
Trinket’s good, right?
For a little malty poo or something.
Yeah, a little teacup dog, sure.
Yeah, trinket.
And how about nosewise and smellfest?
Smell Fest. That’s when you go to the food court at the mall. You have a Smell Fest.
Oh my gosh. Or just a dog sticking his head out the window, right? Smell Fest.
There we go.
Well, I guess they didn’t have cars back then.
Sticking his head out of the wagon.
And here are two dog names from the Middle Ages. They must be male dogs because they’re clench and hold fast.
Oh, so they’ve got these strong jaws. Maybe they’re fighting dogs.
Oh, that’s what you were thinking.
Some kind of terrier.
Oh, I was thinking about grabbing your leg.
Yeah, there we go.
Security dogs then.
But I think we only have a pet problem if we start naming them after ourselves.
So if I had a dog and I named it Grant Jr., then we really have a problem.
That would be a big problem.
People are like, I thought you were talking about your son.
I’m like, well, he’s like a son.
That’s actually an interesting idea, Grant Jr.
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Co-workers laughed at my dog’s name – Jeffrey. But it made sense when I explained I had him a couple of months before I decided to keep him, so I had time to get to know his personality. Looking through a book of [human] names, I found Jeffrey, which is Old French for “divinely peaceful.” That certainly fit, so Jeffrey it was. (He was so mellow that he could calm down other dogs by just standing
(Besides, I said, I’m not gonna name him something stupid, then stand on the front porch where all the neighbors could hear me calling at the top of my voice, “Come here, Doodles”!)