A friend just got a beautiful black cat. She is now considering names, and has come up with a clever tie-in with galactic astronomy (dark matter and rotation curves).
I have displayed less creativity, and downright bad taste in picking cat names.
When I was in 5th grade, we found a black cat wandering my grandmother's yard. Both my mother and I like strays -- just about all of our animals were picked up off the street. (Take THAT, self-righteous rescue people! :) )
Being rather uncreative, and naive, I decided to call her "kitty" for a while. But that was a bit unsatisfying, and channeling my inner toddler, I adjusted the leading consonant:
Titty.
Yes, I called my (female) cat titty.
Why? Well, I suppose it was because it had the same "t" sound as those which appear in the second two-thirds of kitty.
But my mom, or anyone else, didn't have the heart to tell me that "titty" meant something else, something that, perhaps, would cause me to blush years hence.
My friends didn't know - I remember one guy calling her "titty" without flinching.
Eventually, my mother, or a teacher, or some other concerned adult wanting to spare me from emotional trauma and embarrassment, told me I had to come up with a new name. I ended up with "Tilly Tinker", pulled, oddly enough, from a grammar exercise.
A part of me thinks that this was a reasonable thing for a child to do - take the dominant consonant sound and replace the less frequent ones with it. "sammich" (sandwich) is an example of a less pronounced version of this.
Or maybe, even then, I knew. I KNEW.
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