Years ago I had a cormorant that liked to sit on the sailboat that I had moored in front of my house. It didn't sing, but it did spill its guts daily. What a mess! I was forever trying to chase it away. One time I rowed out and physically pushed it off the sailboat with an oar! The boat smelled like the out-take pipe at a fish factory. Just offal.
Canada's new fleet of search and rescue helicopters were given the name Cormorant. They are not black, ugly, or submersible (cormorants are divers). They don't eat fish....so why call them cormorants?
Humans have an odd habit of giving animal names to man-made objects or entities. Sometimes it works. The Ford Mustang conjures up images of running freely through the countryside, like the wild unbridled horse itself. The Mercury Cougar? The Mercury Cougar doesn't work so well. The Cougar was named long before the word was misappropriated to mean a 40-something female divorcee dressed in leopard print clothes who trolls the taverns at 1 a.m.looking for drunken boy-toys to drag bag home to Devon. Even with the original meaning of cougar (mountain lion), the name simply doesn't work.
The most egregious misappropriation of an animal name, in my opinion, is the name of a Fredericton radio station. 105.3 FM is known as 'the Fox'. The Fox. The Fox?? A fox is clever, so that should end the comparison immediately, but why stop there? From the internet: "Foxes also imprint droppings with glands located between their legs, and leave markers with glands between their toes. To humans all of these scents combine to form a distinctive skunk-like or musky fox smell". 105.3 has an equally pungent playlist that emanates from a seemingly similar nether region. It gets better....
Fredericton has another radio station, 95.7 FM. Guess what they call their station? The Wolf (cue the howling). To their credit, they may have used this name in jest, trying to outfox The Fox. Mission accomplished.
Ah...the evolution of the English language. Charles Darwin's ship was named the H.M.S. Beagle. Now that was an aptly named ship. The Beagle was a curious boat, always sniffing around the world for things to discover. It would appear that the Beagle, or more accurately Darwin himself, pissed on a lot of people's feet. I suppose Darwin' ship could have been called H.M.S. Monkey Business and that would have worked too.
Can you think of any animal names that have been used where they shouldn't? There must be hundreds of examples.
I think the car named Jaguar is a good example. Originally they were sporty and stealthy like the ferocious feline. Now they just carry around bloated aristocrats and puffed up orthodontists. The mystique is gone.
Good one! Mercury once made a car called the Mercury Mystique. It rolled off the tongue nicely, but there was no mystique to the car. There were no Mystiques in driveways or garages either. Going back to the Cormorant helicopter for a moment, I can think of another helicopter that should have been named after an animal. Canada's venerable (??) fleet of Sea King helicopters should have been named Osprey. Typically they hover in the air, then plunge into the water.
You have a deadly sense of humour, Ian. Here's a question for you....if you had to name a radio station after an animal, what would you call it?
That's easy. I'd call it 102.3, the Neddy Hole.
Holy! With a name like that, what would the station be like?
Just like all the others in New Brunswick.
Or like a cormorant on a sailboat.
Exactly.
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