In which I explain the naming of cats

On a discussion on flickr group “Cat in the Bag“:

We have six cats: three littermates, and three who are not related.

Bonnie and Clyde (usually known to us as Baby Clyde) are two of the littermates, and despite their outlaw names, are the most incredibly sweet blue tabbies you could ever hope to meet.

Barbra Streisand, the third littermate and the alpha male (yes, an explanation is coming!), came to us as a beautiful Bengal-like cat with the undignified name of Billy (undignified because it was presumably short for Billy the Kid). We thought he needed a more dignified name, so we started calling him "Noname" for a while until we figured it out. Eventually we realized that he had the same profile as Babs herself, and it just stuck. Also, he has the most sing-song meow of any of the cats, so it fits.

The next adoption was Blackberry, an exotic-looking Bombay-like black cat who came to us as Magellan, and Cocoa before that. I don’t remember exactly how we decided on Blackberry, but he’s very sweet, so it stuck.

A few months later, we adopted another black cat — a kitten — and she was named Angel at the time. It was definitely an ironic name because she was about the most terrifyingly energetic kitten we’d ever seen. Irony is good, but by now we were on a roll with the "B" names and we renamed her Black Cherry.

Finally, we decided that we needed a sixth kitten to round out our Brady-Bunch-esque cat clan, and for parity, it needed to be a female brown tabby with an entertainment name. Luckily, my husband tracked down the world’s most adorable kitten, we named her Bopper, and our family is complete.

Until the next round of kitten adoptions, I suppose. 🙂

I guess I left out the part about Bopper being a ninjakitten.

If you dig this kind of thing and want to share your own cats’ details, go check it out.