Naming a cat is like setting your pen to start a story on a blank sheet of paper. You never know how the story would go, but you mean to start with a flourish. When you name a cat, you have a notion, however romantic, that the name bestowed would set the stage for the development of the kitty's life from then on. One rather likes to play Adam in the naming game; God created animals, but Adam got to name them.
I was rather a romantic child. At that stage of my life, the cats at my house got named monikers such as Joanne, Annalee, Jenny and Sally simply because my best friends (of the human kind) were named such, and I thought that I would honor them, as well as my cats, accordingly. Besides, I thought, cat names should sound human. I failed to take into account my family members, however. Joanne eventually became Jo-Jo, Annalee became Lee-Lee, Sally became, simply, "the mummy cat" and Jenny became "that pregnant cat who ran away".
Generations of cats came and went, and then one day, a scared, white kitten came. We found it in a small ditch. It shivered and sneezed twice. I was going through a religious stage then and named it Moses because it was drawn out from the water. Never mind that it was in fact female and had waded across the ditch; such minor details did not matter. At the hands of my family members, she became "Mush" which then mutated into "Mooch" and "Moochie" and "Moochie-Cat", depending on the level of affection felt at that point in time.
Five years ago, a gorgeous yellow tabby was given to me. I was a big fan of Hobbes of the Calvin & Hobbes fame - that lazy philosophical stuffed tiger which came to life only when Calvin, the naughty little boy, was alone. This tabby would be Hobbes and I would be Calvin. He would be as feisty and as pensive and as sarcastic as Hobbes, as cats sometimes can be. I paused for a while. Calling one's cat might be misconstrued as calling one's butler, not that I had one, but neighbors might think I was being pretentious. In the end, the tabby became, simply, "Super" for his flying and jumping abilities and general hyper activeness. He was as smart as a whip too. A simple peeing exercise would see him with all four legs firmly balanced on a flower pot, dropping excreta into the pot (which may or may not be empty of plants). To him it was a chamber pot of sorts, and therefore precluded him from having to rake through the soil with his paws to bury his droppings personally. So “Super” was the perfect name for him, although, I would dearly like to believe, the sarcasm of Hobbes is in there somewhere too.
