Revelations

So I was talking to Henri the other day, and in the course of the conversation -- I don't remember how this came up -- I randomly referred to him as a giraffe, because, you know, I'd always assumed he was a giraffe.  Don't you think he looks like a giraffe?.  Here is a random cute picture of Henri with Winslow the whale.

Henri and Winslow

Well, it turns out I was entirely wrong, and Henri is not a giraffe after all!  He's a girrafe.  That is pronounced [dʒr-ref], with a vocalic [r] in the first syllable followed by another [r] as the consonantal onset in the second syllable, and the whole thing rhymes with treif.  He showed me his official public ID on the tag on his ear (the one you can see in that picture), and it clearly identifies him as a girrafe rather than a giraffe.  I felt really bad.  Henri's been with me for at least four or five years now, and this whole time I've been assuming he was a giraffe! 

This does make the fact that Henri is carnivorous suddenly make sense, though.