Let’s Play “Name That Cat”

A little gray kitten was found in the parking lot of my work place, and I agreed to take her home (when I get back from helping SarahK move this weekend). It’s freaky, man; one moment I’m normal ole Frank J… and soon I’m going to be a cat owner!
Well, I’m trying to think of a good name for a female cat where I can still keep some masculinity. I already had names for dogs picked out from my favorite fiction (when I finally get a dog, I’m naming him “Tuco”), but never considered naming a cat. What’s a good heroine name for a kitty? Best I have so far is “Samus,” but that’s too geeky. Any ideas?
UPDATE: Here’s a picture of the kitten.

No Comments

  1. What was the name of the cat that was resurrected in “Pet Sematary”? It was an evil little beast (as all cats are anyway).
    Alternatively, name it “Aleurophobe”. It would be a cat that hates its own felinity (if that’s a word, & if not, it should be). FrankM

  2. Our cat is named Fender. I also like Boomer, but in a pinch, Flammenwerfer (Flamm-en-ver-fur) will have to do. Or Zerstˆer (Ts-erst-er-er). But seriously think about the name Greg for the cute little kitty.
    Flammenwerfer = Flamethrower
    Zerstˆer = Destroyer

  3. I had a terrific gray cat Syren. She was a bit of a nutcase – leaps across the livingroom after invisible moths, she’d bat a bottlecap around the kitchen floor until she “scored” it under the fridge, caught mice and would leave the head and the legs on the front porch (gak). She lived to be 15.
    Friend of mine has a gray cat named Smokey. Not very original, but the cat turned 21 last summer and we took her into the brew-pub for a pint. She got one too.

  4. I named my cat Jager, don’t think singer, think delicious herbal beverage. It also means hunter in German or something. My little cousin found a chihuahua and he calls it Business. Those things are kinda like cats.

  5. A grey cat, I would name – Grey Goose. Her friends would likely call her Ms Goose.
    A female cat I would name – Monique Le Dragon.
    So, I can’t decide.
    But I’m glad you’re saving a cat. They are wonderful creatures. My wife and I foster home kittens that can’t be taken care of at the shelter. I will mark you down for a good deed.

  6. Our cat is named Memphis, which is not only the home of country music, but was once the famed city of power in ancient Egypt where cats were worshipped as living gods.
    Cats have never forgotten this.
    Condi is of course a perfect name. But our soon to be Sec State is probably more of a dog person than a cat person. Condi is a great name for a she-wolf. If Condi was a cat, she would be a tiger. Or at least a lioness. But tigers suit her better because they stand alone while cowardly lions need to hunt in packs.
    How about Ann? As in Ann Coulter? I like the idea of Ann Coulter in a cat suit. (see my blog).

  7. i think she needs a Harry Potter character’s name… to go with her sister cat Minerva… they’ll spend a lot of time together… Weasley. or what’s the name of the Herbology teacher? or Hermione. Fleur. what’s Professor Trelawney’s first name?
    or an ALIAS name. Sydney. Syd. Bristow. Irina Derevko. Anna Espinosa. no one say Larvin.
    otherwise, i like Condi. and Thatcher’s not bad.

  8. My best friend (a former Marine) had two toms named “Chesty” and “Attila.”
    Orc names are good. I once had a tom named “Grishnakh” who was a great and merciless slaughterer of anything small, cute and defenseless.
    Remember that cats are obligate carnivores. (Cats cannot synthesize arachadonic acid.) Name one as you would any highly specialized, ruthless, inherently cruel killing machine that must consume the flesh of the living to survive.

  9. How about “She Who Must Be Obeyed”?
    I had a gray cat named “Sasha” of whom I was very fond. Or rather I was a member of her staff.
    Or you could extend the roman myth theme to something like Diana, Venus or Juno.

  10. “meow j”
    “hue” (because grey is a hue)
    “grover” because a great name, and because grover is the cutest seseme street resident.
    “meowzers”
    “dotcom” for the sake of: “this is my cat, dotcom” or “meet my cat, dotcom”

  11. I like “Condi”, too.
    My girlfriend has a boy cat named “Lady” because she thought he was a girl when she got him (runt kitten). Then one day she (he) started growing a couple of tumors between the legs. Now I call him “Lady Killer”. That cat brings dead stuff home bigger than him. I used to hate cats, but this fellow has earned my respect.
    Good luck, Frank.

  12. Aww, Frank’s getting a kitty! I want to see pictures!! (If you refuse to participate in cat blogging, make SarahK post them for you!)
    Hmm, lessee… my current kitties are named Anastasia (the Grand Duchess) and Katarina. Something regal and exotic would do nicely for a female cat.
    Mostly, though, I’ve found that I need to live with a cat for a few days to figure out a good name for it. I have tried to name cats before that I hadn’t really spent enough time with, and found myself calling them something else entirely. I had a male cat once that I named Bartholomew (thinking I’d be clever and call him Mew for short) and after a week or so I started calling him George, after our current President’s father. I wanted him to be a kinder, gentler cat… but he kept impressing upon me his thousand points of teeth.

  13. We had a cat named after “Lady Jane Grey” who was a pretender to the throne of England at some point. A good name for a grey cat.
    Zenobia was a queen who conquered about a third of the Roman empire away from her city of Palmyra for a few years about 250 AD.

  14. I had a pair of ducks once named Boris and Natasha. They slept in the chicken coop at night, and followed the kids out to the pond every morning, and followed them home to the chicken coop every afternoon. But then a fox got Natasha one day when they were out in the pond, broad daylight too! And Boris was never the same after that. He never went to the pond again, either. I think we ended up having him for Sunday dinner a few weeks later, to put him out of his misery.

  15. Oh, I like the name Coulter, after Ann Coulter, for the gray kitten. Our two cats are named Simba (yellow boy cat) and Mara (black girl cat who is the queen of the house, and the spitting image of those black egyptian cat statues from the museums, named after my daughter’s favorite book that year, “Mara, Daughter of the Nile”). We have had Nala, Gracie, Katie (for a gray kitty who we called Kitty so long while we were trying to think of a name, and we thought “Katie” would be the kindest name since she already answered to Kitty) and Jessie. And our dog’s name is Libby, which I heart as a pet name for female pets.

  16. I like the idea above of Nine.
    9mm
    9 lives
    Borg hottie 7 of 9
    It’s all good.
    And when people are confused, so can say you named all your pets in order, this one was Nine.
    If they still look at you funny, you can say “you know, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, nine.”
    Yes, I left out eight on purpose. I’m sneaky.
    Good LotR names:
    Arwen
    Eowyn
    Elanor
    Good Harry Potter names:
    Mrs. Norris!
    Fluffy
    Norbert
    (last two better for dogs, admittedly)
    Good political names:
    Condi
    Maggie
    Thatcher
    Liddy
    Barbara (NOT Barbra!)
    Laura
    Rummie (even though Rumsfeld is a man, you can make almost any name a girl’s name by ending it with an “ie.”)
    Gun names:
    Nine
    Kimber (has a nice lionessy ring)
    Forty (also goes with beer theme)
    Ladysmith
    Miscellaneous cat names:
    Simba
    Sheba
    Cleo
    But no matter what: this has to be the name that YOU like. SarahK is otherwise a perfect human being and the ultimate woman of all women–but naming that cat is YOUR task! Value her input, but YOU decide.

  17. I like the imeow.us – that’s cute! Or you could call her MAO (“my awesome opinion”) – which, if she’s a typical cat, she’ll earn 🙂
    Otherwise, I think “Maggie” after Mrs. Thatcher is perfect!
    I’m owned by two lady purrs: Practically Perfect Princess Pixel of the Prodigious Pounce, and Silly Sultana Smudge of the Stupendous Swoop. “Pix” and “Mudge” if you’re being informal….
    😉

  18. First, make sure that it truly is a female kitten. You get some funny looks from the vet referring to a nascent tom cat as if female.
    I like to get familiar with the cat before I try to name it – I once had one named Maggie May because of her habit of rolling onto her back when I walked by.
    Just don’t pick a name you’d be embarrassed to call out in the neighbourhood at 3:00am.

  19. I have a cat nemaed Two-Stroke, and it has fully earned that name with it’s crazy spurts of energy and it’s strange purr. Other cat names I seriously considered and may use someday are:
    Seven (just Seven… I like it for some reason)
    Meatwad (aka Meaty-Kitty)
    Clinger (…)
    Dog (I know, I know…. but it makes me smile)
    But I do like Condi. She strikes me as smooth and classy, yet able to suddenly strike and kill with skilled precision… perfect for a cat.

  20. Moriarty– You would think cats view us as staff, but Red Dwarf puts forward the theory that cats view us as Gods. It really makes more sense than the whole staff thing:
    cats don’t pay us except for a few dead animal offerings once in a while, but always want to do their own thing and only like our interference when they can see how it benefits them. Plus, they do absolutely nothing useful for us, yet we go to a lot of trouble to keep them around. Sounds like we’re Gods of Cats to me.
    I knew someone who had a cat called “Cooter.” No joke.

  21. Liberal
    Then every time the cat bites you, you can always say, “Oh Liberal, biting the hand that feeds you”. And yes, most cats bite. While cat lovers call it “kissing,” most reasonable people call it eating.

  22. My husband hated cats until one adopted us about 15 years ago. Our home has never been cat-less since.
    I say you name her “Quat” then you can yell “kumquat!” when it’s feeding time.
    Congratulations on the start of a wonderful relationship! 🙂

  23. There’s some good ones here, SaraK beat me to Sydney.
    Maggie is great also-recall Point of No Return:Brigette Fonda@ Mardi Gras?
    Cordite, and Condi- Marvelous!
    My male is named Periscope, imagine telling him to get off the counter:
    “Down Periscope!” His tail was broken as a wee fluffball which makes it point forward at the kink, hence the name.

  24. You people kill me:)
    As the cat is cadet grey, you could name it “Fed”, short for Confederacy after the fighting rooster talked about in Sam Watkins famous book, “Co. Aytch.” THAT would piss of a lot of people for all of the right reasons.
    Condi rocks. Simba is okay. Claude is cool for obvious reasons, but people might start calling YOU Rosie, Frank. How about Free Beer? Not everyone likes cats, but everyone likes Free Beer!

  25. I had a similar dilemma when an orphaned grey kitten showed up on my doorstep about 1 year ago. I named her Athena (greek goddess of military victory, among other things) and I believe that naming the kitty after a Greek God/Goddess is the proper way to maintain masculinity in such a situation. It helps if the God was a war-mongerer, or if the name sounds particularly militaristic. Also, while greek is preferable, other gods may be sufficiently masculine (ie Thor.)

  26. I had a female kitten for a time….absolutely fearless. Would stalk dobermans with obvious intent to maul.
    Named her “Fricka”, one of the various spellings of the wife of Odin and a real “battle axe” in her own right.
    I nominate that, just roll it off the tongue…Here Fricka, Fricka, Fricka…
    Scarab

  27. Stick with Samus. I say trust your first instincts and be PROUD of your geek chic. Sure, most cats kill rodents and birds…but how many bear the name of a killer of aliens who has saved the human race?

  28. “Scratch” or “Scratchy”
    Instead of using it’s claws to kill insurgents (it was declawed by well meaning apartment dwelling liberals)it uses a rifle to “Scratch” insurgents off the face of the planet.

  29. Hippie, I didn’t know you were friends with Data.
    I vote for Scratchy.
    Although I don’t know if you should take my advice, my dog is named Kagogi the Destroyer.
    Ask somebody who knows some Korean what Kagogi is.

  30. I always thought Reagan and Thatcher would be good names for two dogs – chocolate labs or something.
    Condi is pretty much perfect for a cat tho.
    And RWD’s suggestion ‘Allahu Akbar’ made me crack up at work. Imagine at 11pm when the cat runs past your feet and your neighbors hear you shouting that into the night in a murderous rage.

  31. I had a cat that was forever wandering around behind my computer, so I named him Five. And for several happy months, he was the Cat Five behind my computer.
    Is that geeky enough? 🙂
    I vote for Fluffy the Liberal Slayer.

  32. Careful Frank, we don’t want to be reading a news article about you being a cat hoarder someday…. Next thing you know, one cat turns to 2, 3…..and then we see you arrested for animal cruelty, because you’re a shut-in, with 500 cats!

  33. My brother’s cat was named Roadkill. It looked just like roadkill too. It would lay on the sidewalk in front of his house looking all dead and mangy and he would yell “Hey Roadkill!” and it would lift it’s head to see if it was dinnertime. Made people stop and stare.

  34. Ronni, after Ronnie Reagan, chief commie hippie basher of the US. Or Roni (feminine singular of Ronin?).
    Or Master Chief, master slayer of foreigners, especially those little monkey-looking ones.
    Or Pookie.

  35. Or name it “Ayn” or “Ein”, they’re both pronounced the same.
    Or even “Kleinnes Ein” (sorry my German is poor, someone please correct it if that is spelled wrong) though this would be obsolete once the cat grows, unless it stays small.

  36. I like the Alias theme names, but how about going old school Bond? SMERSH or SPECTRE would be an interesting name for a cat. Me? I named mine “Bob”, but it’s supposed to be short for Bank One Ballpark. If you want a name that fits with “Tuco”, maybe you could call the cat “Arch Stanton”?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.