how'd your dog get his/her name?
i was at the vet the other day with all three of the knuckleheads, for their yearly check-ups. my vet happens to be a friend of mine, which is a good thing. i highly recommend that you befriend a vet if you have animals. anyway, as the vet was doing black lab selah's exam, she asked what "selah" means and how selah got her name.
now, anyone who knows me even a little bit knows that i love word etymologies. i gave the vet the short answer right then and there, but later i went home, did a little bit of research and emailed her a big, long answer. because that's how i am.
so, back to selah and her name. first off, it's pronounced "SAY-luh." and second off, i didn't name her. selah came into my world about 3 years ago, when her then-owner decided to move to hawai'i. at the time, hawai'i didn't have rabies on any of the islands and therefore had a six-month quarantine for all visiting animals. selah's owner decided not to put her through that, and a friend of a friend mentioned that selah needed a good home. so that's how i got her.
her previous owner is some combination of an old testament scholar and a yoga master. "selah" is a word that appears in the old testatment a lot, and it appears to indicate a pause or stillness. that's the short answer i gave the vet.
the longer answer is that "selah" ("celah") comes from the hebrew word "calah," which means "to hang," and implies hanging a weight for measure, like in a balance. "selah" came to mean "weigh," as in "weigh someone's words," or, basically, that we should measure or value what has been said. that's why so many old testament verses end with it: "Stand in awe, and sin not: commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still. Selah." (Psalms 4:4).
i'm no biblical scholar, but i find this pretty fascinating.
it's a great name for a great dog -- unusual, meaningful, and, in selah's case, fitting.
so, how'd you decide on a name for your dog(s) or cat(s)?
Comments
Chowder!
We have a large bullmastiff/lab mix named Chowder. Chowder got (stuck with) her name after our first visit to meet her in the shelter, where she was named Themla.
The night before, I was at a Relay for Life event until about midnight, and at some point drowsily sat down in a chair, not noticing it was already occupied by a bowl of clam chowder.
The next morning, in a rush to get to the shelter to meet Thelma, I pulled on my pants from the night before, still caked with dried chowder.
At the shelter, Thelma was so shy she would barely let me put a collar on her and spent our most of our test drive as far away from me as the leash would allow. But right before we got back to the shelter, a little breeze picked up and she got a sniff of the dried chowder.
She made tracks straight to the spot on my pants and started licking like crazy. From then on, we have been best buddies.
After that day, we started trying to come up with names for her (Thelma wasn't quite right), and joking suggested Chowder. It stuck, and surprisingly it's the most fitting name I can think of for a big, slobbery mutt.
Dog Names
Being big Michigan football fans from Ann Arbor, we named our fist dog Biakabutuka, which causes many a furrowed brow in the vet's office. It is after Timunga Biakabutuka a junior football player who scorred the winning touchdown against Ohio State in 1995. We call her Biaka or just B for short. We got her sister from a bredder in Great Falls, and on the ride back to Bozeman we were trying to think of a name. I got out the Montana highway map and started to read the list of city names, got to Choteau and decided it was a winner.
Moss the Border Collie
When my wife and I were in New Zealand for a few months a couple of years ago we visited Walter Peak Station outside of Queenstown and watched a sheepherding demo with a handler and a single border collie named Moss. The handler gave the dog a few instructions, and we all watched in amazement as the dog ran about a half mile, rounded up a group of about 75 sheep on a distant hillside, and herded them in singlehandedly without any further instructions from the handler.
When we got our border collie a year later, we named him Moss! We found out later that it's actually quite a common name among herding dogs, and there was an English herding champ named Moss as well.
Cat names
I named my one cat Jackson because I wanted something masculine but "bouncy" so I thought of Jacks (like the ball and Jacks game from when you're little) and when I told my friend, he "mis"heard me say "Jackson" and I liked that better. But I still call him "Jacks" for short. :) My other kitty I just adopted in November. She is a tortie and about six pounds full grown. (She had babies very young). She also has golden eyes and her fur resembles feathers. So, she very much resembles an owl but has rounded ears similar to a hyena's. I started doing research online for a unique name and found that "Shannon" means "little wise owl" but she didn't seem like just a "Shannon" so I kep searching. Then I thought about how feisty she was and trying to order the bigger, male cat around and I thought of the hyena in "The Lion King" with the voice of Whoopi Goldberg. They hyena's name was "Shensi". So, I combined "Shannon" and "Shensi" and got "Shanzee" and then I added "Xena" for the warrior princess. Thus, "Shanzeena" became her name and I call her Shanzee for short as apparently cats (and perhaps dogs) respond better when there name ends in "eee", or so I read. I think it's fun to name animals something unique and as special as what they bring to our lives. :)
Naming our dogs..............
We have Gus and Cooper, two boxers. I named Gus after Augustus in Lonesome Dove, my favorite movie and Robert Duvall my favorite actor. My dog Gus is like Duvall's character; loveable, loving, funny to a fault and committed to our friendship. Cooper my husband name, he's from England and there was a famous boxer named Cooper. Though my husband doesn't follow boxing he remembered this guy from when he was a youngster. Cooper is truly a boxer, when he plays he's up on his hind legs "boxing".
Dog Names
Most of our dogs since i was little have been named after beer. My current two are Stella (after Stella Artois) a chocolate lab and Porter (after Michelob Porter) a German Shepherd/Doberman mix. He's also mostly black, and Porter beers are dark beers. My family has owned and operated a beer distributor since 1933, so beer is our life. My parents dogs are Otis, a yellow lab (after Doc Otis hard Lemonade, which, sadly lasted less than a summer in our inventory). The other is Roxy, a black lab, we say after Rolling Rock, but my nephew named her when he was 8. We had Mick, a Keeshond, after Michelob lager, but he passed away about a year ago at the ripe age of 14. We had 2 Golden/Chow mixes named Julie and Trisha, after Richard Nixon's daughters...apparently my dad was a fan. Our other Keeshond was Keesha, named after the runt of the litter of Keeshond puppies my moms dog had as a kid...she died about 2 years ago at 17 years old. Dog names reflect the dog and the people! Porter didnt have a name for about a week because i wanted to find his personality before i named him. Now, his name fits him perfectly. It can be a little crazy sometimes at home with 4 big dogs running around, but at night, when they get in bed with me and rest their head on me, it's the best thing in the world.