A dog by any other name ...

It's been a few years and I know my memory's not that great even at the best of times, but I was pretty certain that I've blogged about Dante's various nicknames before. Ok, so I was pretty certain. After doing an extensive search on the blog for that elusive post, reality trumps flawed memory and I concede that such a post was never produced.

Something which I will now remedy.

Nicknames or pet names seem to be a staple in the human world, so it's not surprising that our pets -- which many of us consider among our closest companions -- are conferred an assortment of nicknames for various reasons.

When I was coming up with names for Dante and Atia, I racked my brains over sleepless nights to come up with names that, among a multitude of very personal, subjective conditions/criteria, would also be names that would not lend themselves easily to being shortened or "tongue-twisted" in any way to become some sort of cutesy pet name or nickname by known people and complete strangers, for example, Samuel or Samantha into Sammy or Joe or Joanne into Jojo or something silly. Ok, so those are human names, but I think you get the picture. If I ever have kids, I know I would go through the same thoroughly mind-numbing name selection process as well to avoid such a "problem". I didn't want other people to be lazy with my dogs' names or turn them into cutesy, silly-sounding monikers. My position was if I gave my dogs a certain name, then that's the name I want them to be known as, because I gave them a particular name for a reason.

Anyway, it turned out that I needn't have fretted or worried one bit, because as it is, I am the single biggest culprit when it comes to calling Dante by anything but his given name of Dante ... most of the time.

The main exceptions to me always using Dante's "proper name" are when we are in a training/obedience/competetive sport situtaion and times when Dante has gotten himself into trouble. Otherwise, I seem to have quite the fondness for calling Dante by a whole range of pet and nicknames. Most of them not even direct or indirect derivatives of his actual name, actually.

Not that Dante seems to mind ... amazingly, he responds to them all. :)

Probably the most "generic" and frequently used one is "Puppy". Yes, I still call my 90lb, almost 5 year old somewhat-fearsome looking Doberman "Puppy". At the risk of being overly cheesy: He'll always be a cute little puppy to me.

At some point "Puppy" evolved into "Pup-pup".

And then there's "Bub". I don't know how that came about, probably some sort of word play extension on "Pup". "Bub" just sounds more ... I don't know, like a more solid kind of "Pup", ha.

There's the silly "Dante Boy" and its twin "Puppy Boy", which turns into "Dante Dork" when I'm somewhat miffed at him, which then turns into simply "Dork" or "Knucklehead" when I'm really annoyed at him.

Hmmm, come to think of it, NONE of the nicknames I've used for Dante are any actual derivations from his given name. Guess I picked well, ha!

When The Fred came into the picture, Dante added a few more nicknames to his roster. Nicknames that I've come to adopt too. Among my top two favourites are: "Woofles" and "Lunk". I always feel like bowling over with chuckles when I say them -- How does the man come up with such gems???

As you can see, The Fred definitely tops me in the creativity department when it comes to nicknames.

If I actually spoke Cat, I would definitely seek out the list of nicknames that Pixie and Tinsel use among themselves for Dante. I suspect those would be even more colourful ...