Quirky Things About Us… #1

We are a family of “namers”.

I’m not just referring to nicknames, or pets. Oh no. We’re past that. I’m talking, we name inanimate objects. It goes right along with having a ‘family vocabulary’. What makes it notable, (to me, anyway,) is the logic - or lack of - the boys apply in choosing the names.

Of course, there are the obvious ones… like naming the goldfish “Gill”, or calling the frogs “Hoppy” and “Jumpy”. (And later changing Hoppy’s name to “Lucky”, due to an unusual chain of events involving crickets, a space heater, and soap scum.)

But then, just try to explain Tate’s hamster, “Chicken”. No, not as in “tastes like”.

For some reason the boys like to name cars, too. Grandma’s previous sporty-looking car was known as “Spiffy Whitey”, while her newer Ford Expedition goes by “The Green Bean”. But they really like to ride in Grandpa’s huge diesel Dodge Ram Quad-Cab… “Big Red”.

Our minivan? The boys call it “Pahoehoe”. Well, just look at it!

You see, there are two kinds of lava. 'A’a is the slow-moving, rough, crumbly lava. Ugly.

Pahoehoe is the hot, red, smooth, fast-moving lava you see in Hawaii. I think they did pretty well!




I am guilty of naming things myself, so I suppose they come by it naturally.

For years I zipped around in a little VW Rabbit, naturally, named “Roger”.



But, the real icing on the cake was my first car - the embodiment of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics – “Entropy”. You can google it up, if you’re not familiar, and you’ll find definitions like this:


"Entropy is a measure of the unavailability of a system’s energy to do work" (yeah, that described the car pretty well!)

or

"A measure of disorder in the universe" (mm-hmmm, that too).


Entropy means, simply, that left to their own devices (without adding a great deal of WORK), things will go from order to chaos.

Or, even more simply, things break down. A perfect name for that old Corolla.