On 9/19/19 7:52 PM, Paul Kruczynski wrote:
Eventually the dog just responded like Dammit was its name, so it stuck.
Dogs often end up doing this with "no" which can be kinda counter-productive.
I have heard baby-naming advice given as "Go to a toddler playground and call out the name you are thinking of giving your future kid. If three or four kids respond, don't give them that name." We ran into a similar situation except it was "if you feel super-awkward yelling it, don't name your dog that." (In hindsight I dunno why "Cosmo" seemed so weird to yell, though this was before Seinfeld. Anyway he was an extremely bright border collie mix and "letting him outside" meant opening the front door where he would go out and through the open gate of the lot next door, which served as the "back yard" of our corner-lot house. And apparently one day he got sidetracked by greeting someone on the sidewalk and followed them past a firehouse a good mile away, where on hearing that he was not actually that person's dog they just couldn't shake him, the firefighters called us from the number on his tag.)
We had a puppy named Puppy because we were TOTALLY NOT KEEPING HER after our vet said she'd be 100-110 pounds (she turned up at a 4th of July cookout with parvo and the county shelter was closed so we took her to our vet). We were over at the in-laws' and MIL said something about a friend naming their daughter "Sequoia" which my reaction was "Sequoyah was a dude, Sequoia is a tree, she is gonna be teased about her height whether she's tall *or* short. ... although it'd be an okay name for a dog. A very large dog. OH WAIT WE HAVE ONE." Subsequent vet visit had the vet revising his estimate to 60 pounds because she was older than he'd thought (she was just so underfed her teeth were underdeveloped for her age on the first visit). That was spot-on.
One of our current cats was named Horus by his foster family, but after his littermate Isis was adopted out people kept hearing "Horace" so they changed it to Ramses, which we have stuck with. I often wonder about that littermate, and whether her family changed her name on adoption or not, and if they decided to change it later after the rise of the Islamic State group.