Pet names

People adopt pseudonyms for a variety of reasons, and their motives can be equally varied when they choose other names for themselves, their pets, and even for inanimate objects.

For example, there is the game where you discover what your pseudonym would be if you performed in pornographic films. I am not suggesting that any of our readers would ever consider giving such a performance, but it may be amusing to think up your fictitious porn star name'.

This usually involves adding the name of your first pet to your mother's maiden name. In my case this would result in my stage name being Twinkle May, because our first pet was a cat called Twinkle and my mother's maiden name was May.

Sometimes the name is chosen by adding a pet's name to the name of the street where you first lived, in which case my pseudonym would be Twinkle Claremont.

An article by Harry Thompson in the Guardian on December 30, 1997, suggested other kinds of fictional names you can adopt. For instance, you can discover your name as a music-hall performer by adding your grandfather's first name, the first musical instrument you played as a child (preceded by Mr') and the surname of your English teacher at school. This would make me Ted Mr Piano' Thompson.

I mentioned above that my first pet was a cat. There is an amazing diversity of names given to pet cats, although they are often christened with conventional names like Ginger and Tigger. Some years ago, a survey of the most popular cat names included Sooty, Smokie, Brandy, Fluffy, Tiger, Tom, Kitty and Blackie.

Yet T S Eliot accustomed us to much stranger names in his Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939), with such names as Mungojerrie, Rumpelteazer, Bustopher Jones and Mr Mistoffelees. In real life, T S Eliot's own cats included Bubbles, Xerxes, Wiscus and George Pushdragon.

It is rather disappointing to find that the poet Matthew Arnold called his cat by the prosaic name of Blacky, although he had another one with the more exotic name Atossa (from the mother of Xerxes), a cat who would sit quietly for hours beside the cage of Arnold's canary Matthias (recalled in Arnold's poem Poor Matthias).

Other writers are well-known for their pet cats: Edward Lear for Foss, Horace Walpole for Selma (immortalised in Thomas Gray's Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes), and Dr Johnson for Hodge, about whom Boswell wrote: "I never shall forget the indulgence with which he Johnson treated Hodge, his cat: for whom he himself used to go out and buy oysters, lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature. I am, unluckily, one of those who have an antipathy to a cat, so that I am uneasy when in the room with one; and I own, I frequently suffered a good deal from the presence of this same Hodge."

Charles Dickens allegedly had a cat which he called William, until it unexpectedly gave birth to a litter of kittens, whereupon its name became Williamina.

Foreigners also give strange names to cats. In her Book of the Boudoir (1829), Lady Morgan describes dining with the Archbishop of Taranto: "He said to me, You must pardon my passion for cats, but I never exclude them from my dining-room, and you will find they make excellent company.' "Between the first and second course the door opened, and several enormously large and beautiful Angola cats were introduced by the names of Pantalone, Desdemona, Otello, &c."

You might expect dog names to be different from cat names but a recent survey showed that Molly is a favoured name for dogs as well as cats. However, while cat names often refer to the animal's colour or furriness, many dog names hint at masculinity or nobility - like Max, Sam, Prince and Oscar - as well as sporty names like Beckham and Tyson. Charles Dickens had a large mastiff called Turk - although he also had a smaller dog named Mrs Bouncer.

The most famous dog with literary connections is probably the devoted pet spaniel of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, named Flush, whose fictional life was recounted in Virginia Woolf's Flush: A Biography (1933). Other famous literary dogs include Alexander Pope's Bounce and Lord Byron's Boatswain, who both had poems written about them by their masters.

In more recent times, James Thurber was a well-known dog-lover, whose pets included the Airedale terrier Muggs, "the dog that bit people".

Thurber wrote: "Mother used to send a box of candy every Christmas to the people the Airedale bit. The list finally contained 40 or more names."

Tony Augarde is the author of The Oxford Guide to Word Games (OUP, £14.99) and The Oxford A to Z of Word Games (OUP, £4.99)