one of the best parts of horses and the horse world are the dramatic names, it’s honestly my favorite. i want my professional job to be naming racehorses stupid things. i write fiction about racehorses sometimes, and the best parts aren’t the dramatic crime scenes, they’re the the racehorse names i get to come up with. like:
i have literal lists dedicated to this
I had an extremely vivid dream a few months back that I was trapped in a fire tower (to watch for wildfires) that was surrounded by wildfire and my manager emailed me and told me I had to legally name every single horse owned by the national park service and enter them all in a database as the flames grew closer.
The dream mostly consisted of trying to figure out the Secret Horse Naming Rules of the Offical Horse Database so that I could name all Sixteen Thousand Horses. Rules included “Must contain real, whole words” “No Profanity” and “No repeats at all ever, for any horse that ever lived”.
I kept thinking of new things like “I’m pretty sure I know more swear words than the Horse Database” and “I bet there aren’t horses named just strings of random nouns” and “I bet I can gives horses last names”
Some of the names I remember, as the flames howled around the tiny tower and I was filled with vengeful rage:
Valid-To-Eat-Fingers-O’Malley
Dishwasher
When You Are Engulfed In Flames
dinosaur chicken nugget
The First Third Of The Bee Movie Script Before I Hit The Secret Character Limit
I often wonder what my pets have named me. Humans are a visual species and like to name our pets based on their aspect or colour, so I think my dog with his smell-based worldview would come up with a smell name. I imagine something cute and cheerful and a little over the top in a dog way, like Applefriend Cake, because my laundry product gives my clothes a sweet, slightly apple-y smell which might remind Pandolf of happy memories of tasting cake crumbs. Unless he was feeling serious the day he named me, and basing himself on the fact that I read a lot and my hands often smell like book pages when I pet him, and went with something more decorous that translates to Paperdust Pal. Cat naming conventions are more enigmatic since they are less preoccupied with human affairs. My catgiven name was probably the result of a secret ballot vote among my cats, who decided upon something that resonates with cat history and heritage—a dated, unfashionable name if they felt a duty to honour one of their ancestors or if I’m lucky, a mythological figure from cat lore.
this is such a good post now i want to know what the cat i live with calls me
How does it feel to be the funniest motherfucker to ever grace my inbox
Tags:
#Hannibal #names #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #cannibalism cw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what
Me: It took me years to realize that “Discipline and Punish” Foucault and “giant pendulum” Foucault were different people
Friend, with some ha-ha-but-kinda-serious horror and exasperation: Wait, there are TWO Foucaults?
This is me, except with “fast Fourier transform” Fourier and “utopian socialism” Fourier.
It would be even fourier if there were four of them, but I guess they are not quite that foury.
According to Wikipedia, there’s also “Catholic Saint” Fourier, but no fourth Fourier. Which is fitting, as though they’re Fourier, they’re not the Fouriest.
People keep leaving “Isn’t Bill’s first name Bilius?” comments on one of my HP posts and the answer is no. I checked before I posted. Bill Weasley’s first name is actually William.
“Do you, William Arthur, take Fleur Isabelle….?”
– Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Chapter 8. The Wedding
People are getting the name Bilius from a Weasley uncle, the one who saw a Grim and died twenty-four hours later. Ron’s middle name is also Bilius. Ron presumably was named for this uncle.
“Talking about Muriel?” inquired George, re-emerging from the marquee with Fred. “Yeah, she’s just told me my ears are lopsided. Old bat. I wish old Uncle Bilius was still with us, though; he was a right laugh at weddings.”
– Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Chapter 8. The Wedding
It’s kind of funny to imagine, though, that Bill could have grown up thinking that his name was Bilius. Kids often don’t know the “correct” names for things because the adults in their life refer to these things incorrectly as an in-joke or by nicknames. If everyone called him Bill and Bill grew up knowing his Uncle Bilius, then he could have very plausibly been under the impression for many years that his name was also Bilius.
Until, of course, September of 1982 rolls around.
Professor Minerva McGonagall opens a scroll and begins reading off the names of the first-years who are to be Sorted. She gets to the very last name on the list (entirely possible with a W name) and calls out: “WEASLEY, WILLIAM!”
11-year-old “Bill” Weasley, who has just this second found out that his first name is actually William: “…Who?!”
You can probably bet that Bill’s siblings sometimes called him Bilius as a joke too. Like, “BILIUS ARTHUR WEASLEY, HOW DARE YOU!”
Bill, unperturbed: “Yes, how dare I, Bilius Weasley, do this.”
Or maybe:
Charlie, speaking for all the Weasley siblings at the wedding: “YOUR NAME IS WILLIAM? SINCE WHEN???”
Bill: “Since always, apparently.”
Molly & Arthur: “What did you think his name was?”
Charlie: “I THOUGHT IT WAS BILIUS. LIKE UNCLE BILIUS.”
Arthur: “…No.”
Molly: “Why would you think that?”
Charlie: “WE’VE ONLY EVER CALLED HIM BILL?!?”
Charlie: “OH SHIT, WHAT’S MY NAME? DO I HAVE A SECRET NAME TOO?!”
Molly: “…You don’t… you don’t have secret names.”
Ron: “I want a better secret name than Ronald.”
Fred: “DIBS ON MANFREDO.”
Ginny: “I will now only answer to Ginwumpkinwinsalot.”
Tags:
#Harry Potter #fanfic #headcanons #embarrassment squick #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #names
No horse in these races can have the same name as any other horse that has ever entered in the history of horseracing. They had appropriate ones at first. Then, slowly, like profiles on the Gaia forums, all the good user IDs URLs horse names got taken. Currently, they’re being named by rich old white guys. If our generation ever starts participating in this, I anticipate solemn-faced announcers on ESPN498 speculating on the Vegas odds for x_FURY-666-WRATH_x.
Not necessarily. If you’re creative enough, you can invent a euphoninic name that no one has ever used before. Or, if you aren’t, you can just make a computer do it for you like ilzolende did.
For the longest time, Starcraft the horse was what you got if you looked up “starcraft” on Wikipedia.
Not even a disambiguation page! You just went straight to the horse.
It took so many edit wars to get it to the current state where Wikipedia finally accepted that most people typing “starcraft” into Wikipedia are looking for the video game, not the horse.
In this day and age, the convention of giving all of one’s children their father’s name is outdated and oppressive, not to mention limited in the family situations it handles. But the alternatives have their own shortcomings.
My spouse and I decided to keep our own names when we got married, and kick the can down the road for when we actually have children. But we’re going to have to decide how to handle it eventually, so I’ve been thinking about our options.
What’s so important about determinism? It’s not like I’d resent losing a coin toss more than I’d resent just automatically losing every possible coin toss.
Kind of personal preference, I guess? To be honest I don’t like my spouse’s last name, and maybe that’s my real rejection to doing a coin flip. If you’re equally OK with either last name then it could be a good option. Definitely worth considering; it has many good properties.
Personally, I’m fond of the idea of doing hyphenated surnames in which maternal halves are matrilineal and paternal halves are patrilineal: mother X-Y and father A-B have child X-B.
It doesn’t cover everybody, but it seems like pretty much any naming scheme would have coverage problems (except union names, but that’s more of an absence of a scheme, “pick whatever you want”). I think of it as a “sure, you can do whatever you want, but if you *want* a default option, here it is”. (And one can use it as a starting point, adapting it into variants like “lesbian couple who give their kids both maternal halves, and flip a coin to decide the ordering”. (Or “–and pick whichever ordering sounds better”, etc))
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(context: happily born-hyphenated, not planning on having kids but that doesn’t mean I haven’t considered the thought experiment of what their surnames would be)
Unpopular opinion: if it’s true, it should always be acceptable to say “I can’t pronounce that; it has phonemes not present in my native language.”
or I have a lisp or other speech impediment or hearing impediment etc. etc.
Tags:
#yes this #fun wif forn fronting #there’s plenty of names from my *own* culture I can’t pronounce let alone other people’s #(sometimes) #(if I think about it for a while) #(it bothers me a little that I’ve never heard my father’s name) #(not the way it’s *meant* to be heard) #(qualia are weird) #(I suppose that means this qualifies for the tag) #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #racism cw #ableism cw
Right, that reminds me of what I was going to say when you liked the previous post. (That like was on the OP rather than my reblog, but I saw it anyway because I was looking at the notes.)
Every time you, a person named Somni, like one of my kink posts, I start wondering about nominative determinism. (Although with a chosen name, even if there is causality it might go the other direction.)
*looks up nominative determinism on Wikipedia*
… the entire article is delightful.
The term has its origin in the “Feedback” column of the British popular science magazine New Scientist in 1994. A series of events raised the suspicion of its editor, John Hoyland, who wrote in the November 5 issue:
“We recently came across a new book, Pole Positions—The Polar Regions and the Future of the Planet, by Daniel Snowman.[39] Then, a couple of weeks later, we received a copy of London Under London—A Subterranean Guide, one of the authors of which is Richard Trench.[40] So it was interesting to see Jen Hunt of the University of Manchester stating in the October issue of The Psychologist: “Authors gravitate to the area of research which fits their surname.”[41] Hunt’s example is an article on incontinence in the British Journal of Urology by A. J. Splatt and D. Weedon.[42]
We feel it’s time to open up this whole issue to rigorous scrutiny. You are invited to send in examples of the phenomenon in the fields of science and technology (with references that check out, please) together with any hypotheses you may have on how it comes about.“[43]
Feedback editors John Hoyland and Mike Holderness subsequently adopted the term nominative determinism as suggested by reader C. R. Cavonius. The term first appeared in the December 17 issue.[44] Even though the magazine tried to ban the topic numerous times over the decades since,[45] readers kept sending in curious examples. These included the US navy spokesman put up to answer journalists’ questions about the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, one Lieutenant Mike Kafka;[46] authors of the book The Imperial Animal Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox;[47] and the UK Association of Chief Police Officers’ spokesman on knife crime, Alfred Hitchcock.[48]
Sue Yoo, a lawyer, said that when she was younger people urged her to become a lawyer because of her name, which she thinks may have helped her decision.
Weather reporter Storm Field was not sure about the influence of his name; his father, also a weather reporter, was his driving force.
Psychology professor Lewis Lipsitt, a lifelong collector of aptronyms,[83] was lecturing about nominative determinism in class when a student pointed out that Lipsitt himself was subject to the effect since he studied babies’ sucking behaviour. Lipsitt said “that had never occurred to me.”
In 2015 researchers Limb, Limb, Limb and Limb published a paper on their study into the effect of surnames on medical specialisation.
New Scientist coined the term nominative contradeterminism for people who move away from their name, creating a contradiction between name and occupation. Examples include Andrew Waterhouse, a professor of wine,[63] would-be doctor Thomas Edward Kill, who subsequently changed his name to Jirgensohn,[64] and the Archbishop of Manila,Cardinal Sin.[65][E]
I googled “Somni kink” and got my own posts as the first results. [ And several other people with the username “somni” on other sites after that. I’m … not actually in the Supernatural fandom(yet?). In case anyone was wondering. ] So I suspect this is not the name of a specific kink but a general allusion to hypnosis.
In this case, it might be of note that my girlfriend ( Sofi ) (( @sigmaleph )) is rather fond of hypnosis things. And I am interested in her as well.
I’m kind of shy about these things, so I don’t like listing things that I like directly. If you or anyone else is interested, I created an editable document of my kinks and people (including those I’ve done things with) have been filling it in.
Re: nominative determinism, those are some delightful quotes.
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There is a fetish called “somnophilia”, which is a term that sounds like it ought to apply to me but actually refers to having intercourse with unconscious people (occasionally to other people having intercourse with you while you’re unconscious, but mostly you hear from tops). Sometimes I look through somnophilia stuff in case somebody like me wandered in because they got confused by the name, or is deliberately trying to expand the definition. (I could see an alternate, more genitally-inclined version of me being into semi-conscious intercourse, which is why I got excited when I saw somebody in the Tumblr somnophilia tag talking about how they were into that…and then they turned out to be fictional.)
I went back and checked, and it looks like you haven’t actually pressed the “like” button on any of my posts regardingmyadventuresin the Tumblr somnophilia tag, although the also-very-aptly-named @spiralingintocontrol did once. (And you did like the pun about fucking the natural order.)
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I don’t see anything unkind, given that you did ask Sofi’s permission.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #so apparently it’s one of those days when I spend a lot of time writing blog posts and don’t get as much video gaming in as I’d wanted #*shrug* #(expect a Flight Rising post in the near future though) #(hopefully before bedtime)
Right, that reminds me of what I was going to say when you liked the previous post. (That like was on the OP rather than my reblog, but I saw it anyway because I was looking at the notes.)
Every time you, a person named Somni, like one of my kink posts, I start wondering about nominative determinism. (Although with a chosen name, even if there is causality it might go the other direction.)
Brinens and Things 