I talk to Felicity all day as I sew and do my work, and of course, I don’t call her ‘Felicity’ every time. It’s far too long and formal.
I do love saying ‘Hel-lo Fe-li-ci-ty’ when she comes in after an explore outside, enunciating each syllable.
Hello Miss Felicity!
Other than that I call her ‘Fissy’, ‘Fis Fis’, ‘Fiskins’, ‘Fissy Kitty’, and ‘Miss Fiss’.
Awwww....Fissy Kitty
Less fortunate times, she gets called ‘Brat’, ‘You Horrible Thing’, and ‘The Cat’ (as in, “Gah! The Cat just tore up my silk chiffon”) or just ‘Really?’
Sigh. Really?
When I really, really love her, I call her ‘Baby Fissy Kitty’ and ‘Kitten’.
Look at Kitten
And when she lies in the sun with her tummy up and just exudes adorableness, then she gets called ‘Fuzzy Happiness’.
Yep. Fuzzy Happiness.
Awww, your cat is beautiful! I call my dog the Piddle Princess on those charming, long walks where she pees every 2 inches along the sidewalk. And when she misbehaves she becomes Miss Puppy Porridge. (Sometimes I even show her the big pot!)
Margaret Mary, my tortoiseshell cat, is mostly called Maggie, but is ‘my little tortellini – stuffed full of tortie goodness’ when we are having smooching sessions. I blame ‘Buffy’ for this.
D’aww! I’ve not seen enough of Buffy to get the reference, but it sounds adorable.
It was a Willow line about ‘chocolatey cookie goodness’, said with a straight face. And the phrase was reprised often enough to stick in my mind.
Ah hah! Not at all about cats
I’ve got 2 kitties. Ray is beautifully soft to touch and loves being brushed; she’s soft kittie. Star isn’t as soft to touch, but often rolls over for the tummy rubs; when she does that I call her Tummy Kittie.
A cat that volunteers for tummy rubs? Star is quite a special cat!
She is, she’s an attention hog and loves it when I sit down to read or play x-box too; she’ll sit on you, purr and demand pats and scratches. If you’re walking along she does the lie down and roll for tummy rubs, and it’s almost impossible to pass that up!
I love kitty names!
Puss is often: Itty Bitty Kitty, Itty Bitty Hyperactive Kitty, Kitten, Silky Kitty, Smitten Kitten, Smitty, Puddy Tat, Kitten Bitten and “Ohh You Little B***” when she’s clawing something she’s not supposed to touch.
Boof is: Boofy, Boof Monster, Boof Meister, BoofBoof, Boofhead, Fluff Bum, “ShakeDatTail” (he does this crazy little tail quiver and its SO cute seeing all that fur shake about), StinkyBum and that’s about all.
Haha! I love the story about the tail quiver!
What a lovely post about an amazing feline friend…there’s a beautiful poem by T.S. Eliot called “The naming of a cat”, which I always enjoy.
Yes, cats simply have to have such a lot of names, that’s part of their charm :)))
I do wonder if Felicity has an ineffable name of her very own. She’s not a very cat cat in some ways – too human for a cat!
We don’t have a cat anymore but we have just as many nicknames for my little sister.
I loved this post! Miss Felicity is so adorably fluffy! We usually call Walnut “Muao Muao,” which translates to “cat cat” in Cantonese, but “big brown slug” is also quite popular when he is lazing around on top of my fabric…
Oh, I love Muao Muao, and that it actually means cat! My sister called one of our cats Meow Meow when she was a toddler, so he ended up getting named Chairman Meow. And the toddler next door calls Felicity Meow Meow. I hear a hopeful little voice saying “Meow Meow home?” and see a little face peering through the cat door. D’aww.
Our cat is named Icky-Picky (blame my best friend Sarah over at 18thcmadness.blogspot.com for that name!). It’s hilarious how she stands beside the sewing machine staring at it when I’m sewing. Sometimes we call her Icks, or just That Darn Cat. Now her new nickname is Momma Kitty, since she just had two kittens, Ulrich and Mitzie (one we had to rescue from the ceiling and the other from behind the bathtub…..took 5 hours to get that poor stuck kitty out.) We still call Ulrich, Uli, because we first though he was a girl. Poor guy. 😀
I wonder, have you by any chance read Unadulterated Cat by Terry Pratchett? One of my favourite books. 😉
Our pet names are a bit harder to share, because they are Czech. 🙂 Czech pet names are obviously formed differently from English pet names. Moreover, my family’s pet names for our cats are probably slightly different from those of other Czech people. Their “standard” names are Finnish; we’re kinda crazy that way.
We have these “taboo names” for our cats – Yksi is The Penetrating One (called just The Penetrator in English) and Kaksi is The Jostling One or, as grandma calls her, “Butting Kitty”. Collectively, they’re “The Black Ones”. Sometimes, especially when sitting behind a window, staring at us and trying to hypnotise us into letting them in or feeding them, “The One With The Ears”.
They get called Yksinka/Kaksinka when cute; Yksiště/Kaksiště and Yksice/Kaksice are a bit rougher, although often used lovingly, too.
Other than that, they also get called, not surprisingly, “Cat”. Usually said in a raised voice, as in “You Cat! (stop doing what you are doing!)” And “Potvora” (“Beast”), “PÅ™ÃÅ¡era” (“Monster”), and “Obluda” (ditto). Or “ObludÄ›nka”. As in “little cute monster”.
Forgot to mention “ZvÃÅ™e” – “Animal”. Serves the same purpose as “Cat!”. It does not quite have the same ring to it in English, though!
Oh, and of course they are “Miss Yksi” and “Miss Kaksi”. Cats just have to be called with their titulars, right? “Miss Kaksi walked off.”
I have two cats, with a plethora of nicknames. They both enjoy “helping” me sew. Jackson is Fuzzy Buddy, Jack Jack, and Kitten Love (when he is purring and being sweet), and Harvey (a girl) is Harvs, Harvard, Harvey Cat and Pretty Cat (since she is so smooth and silky).