The Saddest Octopus

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that there had been Shenanigans up in the Northern Domicile.  This is because the apartment I had been living in got infested with bed bugs and we all had to evacuate and the menagerie was quarantined and it was all really messy and I ended up slightly homeless and spent a few months occupying the couch of the incredibly generous WMPT and EHC.  Magick, Seal, Gilly, Plouie, and Ilari came with me.  I am still amazed that they were willing to look after us for so long.  It's a good thing Hrithik went into quarantine with the others or they might not have been.

Anyway, so while I was there, WMPT went to the Museum of Natural History and rescued an octopus.  He and EHC seem to have a penchant for taking in distressed stray creatures, I guess.  The poor octopus was pretty distressed; it didn't even talk when he first brought it in.  It would just look at you with these huge tragic eyes.  WMPT asked me to take it in, because he knows I have a menagerie and hoped it would feel at home.  He and EHC have a menagerie too, but theirs is full of eldritch creatures (whereas I have only one eldritch creature in mine) and he was concerned that they'd be too much for the poor traumatised octopus to handle.  I concurred.  I don't think I've ever seen anything quite so distressed as this poor octopus.  I started thinking of him as the Saddest Octopus because he wouldn't tell us his name or anything.  He'd just look at us with these huge doleful eyes.

The Saddest Octopus -- not the best picture, but look at those tragic eyes

The Saddest Octopus is at something of a disadvantage in my menagerie because he's the only invertebrate, so I carefully put him with other sea creatures in hopes that he'd be able to find some common ground to talk about.  He doesn't really talk much, though.  Whatever has happened to him shook him up pretty bad.

Fortunately for him, we happen to have a world-class psychotherapist among us.  Ilari is really good with trauma victims, it turns out, so he's been working with the Saddest Octopus, and I am pleased to report that after several months we've managed to get the Saddest Octopus to talk to us a little bit.  Only a little bit, but that much constitutes considerable progress, so we are quite hopeful that he might end up okay.

We don't know much about what happened to him yet, and Ilari, who knows more, isn't telling because of confidentiality and all.  But we've learned the Saddest Octopus's real name, and once you hear the story of his name, you'll have some idea as to why he's so very sad.  I mean, even the poor thing's name is traumatic.

The Saddest Octopus is named Tollemache-Tollemache Featherstonehaugh-Featherstonehaugh-Featherstonehaugh-Featherstonehaugh.... or possibly Tollemache-Tollemache Featherstonehaugh-Featherstonehaugh-Featherstonehaugh-Featherstonehaugh.  That is the tragedy: he really doesn't know which.  His mother was a Featherstonehaugh-Featherstonehaugh, and his father was a Featherstonehaugh-Featherstonehaugh, and when they went to hyphenate their names, they really could not agree which of them should come first.  Should their son be a Featherstonehaugh-Featherstonehaugh-Featherstonehaugh-Featherstonehaugh or a Featherstonehaugh-Featherstonehaugh-Featherstonehaugh-Featherstonehaugh?

Although he hasn't directly talked about it, it's pretty clear that the Saddest Octopus was very deeply affected by this debate.  His parents fought over his surname fiercely for a couple of years and then went through a very bitter divorce over it; he clearly blames himself, and now he can't even give his name to people because he doesn't want to have to take sides in the matter and therefore the poor guy doesn't even know what his name is!  Can you imagine?

Now, it's pretty clear that the name wasn't really the problem for the Saddest Octopus's parents.  It was symbolic of much larger issues in their relationships.  His mother's family, the Featherstonehaugh-Featherstonehaughs, is working class, while his father's family, the Featherstonehaugh-Featherstonehaughs, is very wealthy, so his mother got a lot of slurs from his father's family and she never thought he supported her enough; he, in turn, eventually started trying to make her feel inferior.  She wasn't a Featherstonehaugh-Featherstonehaugh for nothing -- her family is known for being pretty tough -- so she fought back.  Apparently she won a pretty decent chunk of her ex-husband's assets in the divorce proceedings.  But the poor Saddest Octopus still blames himself.  Children are like that: they blame themselves for their parents' issues and demons.  It's really hard to work through all of that.

So that's the very beginning of the story of the Saddest Octopus.  Hopefully, as he gets more comfortable with all us freaky vertebrates, he'll tell us more about himself, and maybe even become a little less sad.

Wild Parliamentary Onomastics

It took some doing, but we finally figured out the names of all seven members of the new Wild Parliamentary Monarchy delegation.  I am particularly proud of us given that three of said members are felines and two of them also have titles.  

Some of these names are old news, of course, i.e.,

• The capybara is named Pedro, which is a reference to The Twenty-fifth Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.
• The lynx is named Sir Theophilus Pearl, Bart., commonly called Sir Theo; the surname is a reference to the almost pearlescent quality of his fur.
• The ermine is, yes, named Angel Joe.  It came to me in a dream.  I don't know why.

 Others of them are not old news.

• The goat is named Nicodemus, probably because his nouveau riche parents were trying too hard.  My cousins had a black cat named Nicodemus, so it seemed like a good name for a white goat.  [This is not a complete reconstruction of my thought process, but it's kind of very close.]
• The owl is named Hrothgar Q. Hornbeam, Viscount Twilby.  Since he's a viscount, he'll typically be called Twilby, although Sir Theo addresses him as Hrothgar because they're old friends.  He has graciously given his permission to me to address him thus myself, which makes me very happy because I am uncommonly fond of the name Hrothgar, but I'll probably end up using both names.
• The serval is named Lady Faraday Pebble-Stone; the "lady" is due to her status as an earl's daughter.  Her surname is a reference to the markings on her coat, which look rather a lot like pebbles; we agreed that plain Pebble felt a bit too Flintstonian, and surely one of these guys would have a double-barrelled name.
• The panther is named Ruthven Jet Shadewater, Earl of Ebonwood, although his intimates (including Sir Tristan and Lady Faraday) call him Magick.  Coming up with a surname for him that was a) a reference to nature and b) a reference to black things and c) not a totally obvious reference to black things and d) vaguely plausible as English pseudo-aristocratic was remarkably hard.  I'm rather proud of both his title (by which most of the Wild Republic will be required to address him) and his nickname, which is a very indirect reference to blackness.

Everyone has a name now, which is a relief.  Tomorrow we're going to introduce the new delegation to the Wild Republic, who so far have met only Sir Theo, who has been in AJD's room to confer with Alfredo.  This promises to be memorable and we fully intend there to be photographic evidence.

Also at some point I really ought to tell everyone the story behind the Sir Tristan-Lady Faraday-Magick relationship, now that I've learned it.

Getting to Know the New Ambassadors

Some of the members of the new delegation are more secretive than others, but here's what I've managed to learn about them so far.

Pedro, the capybara, is in fact Sir Pedro.  He was knighted for his merits as a doctor.  At first glance, he seems an unlikely candidate for such distinctions: he looks like a very large guinea pig.  He's got this sort of steely-eyed glare, though, which indicates that he's a force to be reckoned with.  All of the others clearly respect him - including the panther - and he's the sort of person who doesn't say much, but always says something worth listening to when he decides to say something.  He also has a rather caustic sense of humour and remarkably cute little ears.  (I'm not going to let him see that last part.)

The only other member of the delegation I've successfully put a name to thus far is the lynx, who is, somewhat improbably, the largest cat I have.  (Go figure.)  His name is Sir Theophilus Pearl, Sir Theo to his friends; like Sir Tristan, he's a baronet.  "Pearl" is an appropriate name for him because his fur has this sort of pearlescent quality. He's been in diplomacy since he was a young kitten, and is the official head of the delegation, with appropriate gravitas, although he's more genial and avuncular than Sir Tristan.  I'm quite fond of him, actually.  He seems to be both level-headed and compassionate, and I can already tell that he and Alfredo will get along swimmingly.

I haven't learned the owl's name yet, but I suspect it's even more eccentric than Sir Theo's.  What I have learned is that he's a scholar, in the grand old tradition of half-dotty abstracted gentlemen.   Sometimes the others refer to him affectionately as "the Professor", but in fact he's not officially affiliated with any university; he's a viscount. He's quite intelligent and (of course) very wise, but a bit absent-minded.  His academic tastes are quite eclectic: officially he's here because of his work on behavioural dynamics, but he spends at least as much time musing about philosophy and he also collects rocks.  Tibby is going to love him.

The goat is not a viscount; he doesn't have a title and is the son of self-made goats.  I feel a bit bad for him.  He was sent to all the best public schools, and his behaviour is generally impeccable, and he's done quite well for himself; but... he's a goat.  Goats aren't really known for their elegance, gentility, or decorum - quite the opposite.  Every now and then he starts randomly eating something, or his speech  sounds a little suspiciously Cockney, and then he gets all embarrassed.  He must be quite brilliant - the others clearly respect him and tactfully look the other way when he starts trying to eat the carpet - but he's a little insecure.

Then there's the panther, whom I find terribly intriguing.  Black felines in general, and black panthers specifically, really take my breath away, and this particular specimen is quite splendidly beautiful.  He's also  (as I said before) very clearly dangerous.  It amuses and astounds me that he and Sir Tristan are best friends from school, because they're so very different and Sir Tristan's impeccable decorum makes him seem much older.  I'm not entirely clear on exactly what his role here is: he seems a highly unlikely candidate for a diplomatic delegation, because he's definitely a loose cannon.  (Also probably a ladies' man, so it's a good thing that he and Sir Tristan are so close.)   Possibly it has something to do with his familial connections;  he holds the courtesy title of earl, as the eldest son of a marquess.  I've yet to learn his name or the specifics of his title, although apparently his friends often call him Magick.

I haven't had much of a chance to get to know the serval yet; she and Sir Tristan are still enjoying their reunion and I'm reluctant to interrupt that.  My impression of her is favourable, both in general and as an appropriate partner for Sir Tristan.  She's very much a lady (officially, even, as the daughter of an earl), and everything she does is eminently dignified.  But she's not here merely because of her association with Sir Tristan.  Apparently she's extraordinarily brilliant and knows absolutely everything one could possibly know about policy.

This leaves the ermine.  I'm still kind of baffled about the ermine; he's so damaged, and I'm not entirely sure of their intentions in sending him off on a mission like this.  Possibly it's a clever disguise, but it doesn't really feel like one.

Maybe It's a Sign?

So I had some weird wacko dream last night that had something to do with a football game.  As American football is my absolute least-favourite sport (no one has ever successfully managed to explain it to me and the men are hideously unattractive; enough said), this was peculiar anyway.  I don't remember much about it other than the football, and the fact that they all had bizarrely long numbers (like, eight digits) on their uniforms, and that "I" - and I think I was a guy, too - was talking to this guy and his girlfriend who was my totally fictitious friend's sister and the guy's name was Angel Joe.

What does this have to do with my menagerie?  Well, I woke up after this dream and found myself cuddling with the still-anonymous ermine, and now I'm wondering whether I should take it as some sort of vision telling me that his name is Angel Joe.  He is white.  White things are angelic... right?

Angel Joe is a very weird name, but now I can't get it out of my head.

In further onomastic news, I have deduced that the lynx's surname and/or title is Pearl, relating to the almost pearlescent quality of his fur; and that the black panther's friends call him Magick, although that is neither his name nor his title.

The Lion Has a Name!

So, AJD and I have acquired two additional pieces of knowledge.  First, the lion is named Judah Navarre Androcles.  Second, leonine onomastics are reaaaalllly screwed up.  The second fact evidently contributed to our delay in discovering the first.

Apparently all lions have three names.  The third name is the name of their lineage.  Navarre's is particularly august: his family are direct descendants of the lion saved by Androcles, and to show their gratitude (and, further, to satisfy an obscure point of honour which I, frankly, do not understand), they replaced their original lineage name with his name.  Navarre doesn't know what his family's name was before the Androcles episode; it's not clear this is because he's quite young or because it's been forgotten.

The astute reader may be wondering why I am referring to our lion as Navarre rather than Judah?  This is the part where leonine onomastics get rather peculiar: all male lions of the clan to which the Androcles lineage belongs have Judah as their first name.  Every single last one of them.  Just as the lion was the symbol for the tribe of Judah (you know, the Lion of Judah), so the tribe of Judah is evidently the symbol for the lions of Navarre's clan.  Judah of the Lions.  I have no idea where this tradition comes from - neither does Navarre - but there you go.

Lionesses do not take the clan of Judah as their mascot.  They have their own: the Egyptian lion goddess Sekhmet.  Accordingly, all lionesses of Navarre's clan have the first name of Sekhmet.  I will not pretend to understand the rationale, but it makes marginally more sense to me than the male lions using Judah.

So our lion's name-name, the one he actually uses, is his second name, Navarre.  Which is a nature name, kind of sort of.  Apparently lions often use the names of specific geographic features as their given names, and by extension started using the names of regions as well, particularly regions associated with lions.  I told Navarre that this was cheating, which he took as something of an affront; he said that the tradition exists because lions are all uniformly the same colour and it's hard to get many different names out of that and most of the ones that exist are considered feminine.  So they do this funny thing with named geographical features and regions instead.  They do use real nature names, sometimes, though: his own mother's name is Goldenrod, and Sandy, Tawny, and Honey perpetually top the most popular names for lionesses.

I did say that leonine onomastics were pretty crazy, right?

Another thing lions like to do is give all siblings names starting with the same phoneme.  Navarre, for instance, has two older sisters; the elder is Nemea, who is artistic and Goth, and the younger is Nittany (a popular name in the current generation), who talks on the phone a lot and is always whining to their mother about something gross her baby brother has done.  (I asked Navarre if she were telling the truth when she went whining and he ran away and pounced on Flurry, from which I conclude that even really Boy Scout lion cubs aren't above being pesky little brothers.)

All three of them have names associated with lions, sometimes tangentially.  The lion Heracles fought was from Nemea; the Nittany lion is the mascot of Penn State (yes, wrong kind of lion, but we've already noted that they're not very picky about this); and Richard the Lionheart was married to Berengaria of Navarre.  One of Navarre's aunts is named Macedonia, birthplace of Alexander, the new Heracles.  His father's name is Kilimanjaro, which I think is associated with lions only insofar as both lions and Mount Kilimanjaro are African.

So, there you go: they might take their royal responsibilities seriously, but lions aren't above bending rules when it suits them, and they're not above being weirdly pretentious on occasion, either.

The River Otter Has Revealed His Name!

It's official: the river otter has revealed his name.  It's Reginald Button, but he goes by Reggie.

Apparently river otters all have vaguely Wodehouse-ian names.  Reggie, like Bertie Wooster, got off pretty easy, as these things go.  To give you some idea of the escape he had, his nephew's name is Barmy Button.  (Apparently it suits him.  We're wondering if this will mean Reggie has insights into Plouie - although Barmy is not so extreme a case.)  This is all to the good; he's an older otter, albeit still very playful, so he deserves a name on the dignified end of the otter spectrum. 

Now, if only we can learn the lion's name before the new delegation from the Wild Parliamentary Monarchy gets here...

Feline Onomastics

AJD and I don't really name our animals.  It's more like we wait for them to reveal their names to us.  In some cases, particularly in the earlier days, an animal went without revealing its name for months.   My little white seal has never told me her name; when I was younger, I was always changing it, which I take to be a sign that she's chosen to be very private with her name and I like to respect personal boundaries.   

I'm not going to write a post about the sources for all of the animals' names.  At some point, probably after we figure out how to take pictures of these guys, I'm intending to start doing features on this animal and that one, and I'll include how we found the animal's name there.  And, in the future, whenever an animal reveals its name to us, I'll do a post about that.

However, there's one aspect of Republican onomastics that I probably should do as a separate post, because otherwise I'll end up having to do it over and over again.  This has to do with the names we give the cats.

The modern Wild Republic has its roots in a trip to Washington DC over the 4th of July weekend three years ago, when I found Leprosy, Parsley, and the three cats of small stature in the gift shop at the Smithsonian.  The three cats all have Sanskrit names: the cheetah is Suraj ("sun"), the snow leopard Chandra ("moon"), and the black jaguar Chaya ("shadow").  (Yes: Chaya's name is Sanskrit, not Hebrew; the pronunciation is different.)  But they don't just all have Sanskrit names; they have Sanskrit nature names.  Therein lay madness, except I didn't realise it at the time.

None of the cats who found me before I became hostess of a Wild Republic chapter have nature names.  There's Casper, Seymour, Skandar, and Sithri: not a nature name in the batch.  But then AJD and I went to the zoo, where we met Flurry and Mahler, who are a snow leopard and clouded leopard respectively, and I thought, hey, snow leopards and clouded leopards could have nature names too... and there we are, the monster was born.  All felines must now have nature names.

Now, the astute reader will undoubtedly be objecting to himself that Mahler is not exactly a nature name, and the astute reader will of course be entirely correct.  But the astute reader should remind himself that Mahler is a surname, not a given name.  His full name is Cirrus Mahler, and Cirrus is of course an impeccable nature name.

The problem, of course, is that sometimes it's easy to come up with a suitable nature name, and sometimes it's not, especially when we're agreed in not wanting any of the animals to have names that are too obvious.

Khamsin's name was pretty easy to learn.  A khamsin is a particularly fierce sandstorm wind in the Sahara, which is suitable for a lightning-fast African feline.  AJD discovered Rusty's name within a day; his fur is redder than many tigers'.  Rust is an element of nature, right?  Rusty's actually only a nickname, but his full name - Marco Sequoyah - has a reference to nature also, and we learned it not long after we learned the nickname.  We decided that a nature-ish nickname and a nature surname ought to be sufficient.

Cami, as a black jaguar, took us rather longer.  This is partly because Cami is our shyest Wild Republican, and he was reluctant to tell us his full name.  "Cami" is a nickname, and it suits him well because his lovely black-on-black fur looks sort of like camouflage.  It is, however, not a suitable nature name.  Gaaa.  Eventually we worked out that his real name is Chalcedony.  Apparently "Cami" is the usual abbreviation of "Chalcedony" among black jaguars.  If you think this is weird, well, "Jack" is a nickname for "John" in English, so I don't think English-speakers are entitled to complain about the opacity of black jaguar pet names.

Then there was Sir Tristan, the ocelot.  He's a member of the Wild Parliamentary Monarchy, and the "sir" is inherited because he's a baronet as well as a knight.  Just try to find a nature name that is a) fitting for an ocelot and b) doesn't sound ridiculous when combined with "sir".  We discovered that the Wild Parliamentary Monarchy, felines tend to have nature surnames rather than nature names; Sir Tristan's full name is Sir Tristan Rivers.  Ocelots like to swim, you know. 

We're currently faced with what is probably our toughest case yet: our new baby lion.  He's not been all that forthcoming so far; he's been too busy fighting with Rusty over which of them gets to be the Top Baby Cat.  (Ancient tiger-lion rivalry, you see.)  The problem with lions is that they're a uniform tawny colour, which doesn't really lend itself to many good nature names.  Also, they're consciously of their own dignity, so our lion must have at least two names, and our boy hasn't given us any of them so far.

Meanwhile, there will soon be more feline names to discover, as the Wild Parliamentary Monarchy was so delighted with Sir Tristan's successes here that they've sent a delegation of his colleagues to join him.  This delegation includes three more cats.  Fortunately, they'll only need nature surnames, which are a bit easier to learn.