I could never have imagined that Grisby’s name, chosen almost at random, would come to be so full of meaning for me. “You will likely call your dog’s name over 50,000 times,” advises the author of How to Raise and Train a French Bulldog. “Pick a name you like!” In his book Bashan and I, the German writer Thomas Mann writes that of all the pleasures he shares with his dog, none is so great for him as addressing the creature over and over again by his name. “Bashan” is the only word that Mann’s devoted and playful setter seems to understand, and his master loves driving him into crazy fits of ecstasy reminding him that not only is his name Bashan but he is Bashan, a truth the dog never seems to tire of. Grisby feels the same way; he seems to love his special name as much as I love to say it. Of course, now that we’ve been together for eight years, I can’t separate the name from the animal it signifies, and I’m irritated when people who’ve known him for years still haven’t grasped it, calling him Grigsby, Bigsby, Gribley, or Grimsby.
We name our dogs the way we name our children; we name the child we imagine having—the child we want—rather than the child we get. Bearing this in mind, there’s a lot to learn about people from the names they give their dogs. Some prefer a name they’ve heard before; others pick something they consider unique, as I did. As with baby names, fashions in dog names go in cycles. In ancient Roman households, it was trendy to give Greek names to your hounds (and your slaves). The most popular Roman dog names were descriptive: Ferox (“Savage”), Melampus (“Blackfoot”), Patricius (“Noble”), and Skylax (“Puppy”). Greek dogs were rarely saddled with the polysyllabic names of their owners (Agamemnon, Olympiodorus). Xenophon, a Greek historian who wrote about hounds in the fourth century BC, maintained that the best names are short, consisting of no more than one or two syllables, so the dogs may be easily called. Popular names were those that expressed speed, courage, and strength, such as Aura (“Breeze”), Horme (“Eager”), Korax (“Raven”), and Labros (“Fierce”).
In the United States, until around fifty years ago, dogs were generally working animals rather than household pets, and their names reflected their tasks and talents: Hunter, Skipper, Pilot, Sailor, Shep. Simple, one-syllable names like Buck, Lad, Jack, and Pal are still popular for working dogs; they’re easy for the animals to learn, and the owners to yell. Grandiose names like Caesar, Nero, and Napoleon have always been in fashion among purebred pets (and people), and descriptive names—Patch, Jet, Domino, Ginger—are still sometimes heard, though not as much as they once were. Traditional dog names like Rover and Fido are also out of fashion; these days, dogs seldom rove, and few of us speak Latin.
Today, at least in Europe and the United States, very few dogs are kept as working animals. Most pooches live in the home and sleep in their owners’ beds; their only task is to provide affection and attention, and they succeed like never before. According to a recent survey, 15 percent of British dog owners consider their pet more important than their cousin, and 6 percent confessed they even preferred their pet to their own partner. Sixteen percent listed their dogs as household members in the 2011 British census, some listing a dog as their “son” on the official form. The deeper the bond we form with our dogs, it seems, the more we make them over in our own image; in keeping with their role as full family members, dogs are now commonly given human names. Today, for the first time in history, the same names turn up in top-ten lists for both babies and dogs: Chloe, Bella, and Sophie for girls; Charlie, Jack, and Max for boys. The same trend is common in Europe, except in the more strictly Catholic countries, where it’s considered sacrilegious to call “soulless animals” by human names.
One fashion that hasn’t changed over time is the tendency for macho guys to give their tough dogs fighting names. Popular names for male pit bull terriers include Tyson, Diesel, and Tank. Other common names include Chaos, Sherman, and Panzer. In Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights, published in 1847, Heathcliff’s bulldogs, which he warns are “not kept for a pet,” are named Skulker and Throttler. It’s not surprising that he mistreats them, nor that he almost kills a spaniel, nor that a child raised in his home is seen “hanging a litter of puppies from a chair-back in the doorway.” Puppies that recover from such misfortunes are invariably named Lucky or Chance. Rocky is the most popular name for dogs that bite, according to San Francisco Health Department records, closely followed by Mugsy, Max, and Zeke.
We fall in love with individual dogs, but it’s difficult to separate the dog from the breed, and it’s not unusual, with dogs as with lovers, that we should fall repeatedly for the same kind. The standard poodle has always been popular with literary and philosophical types. In addition to Schopenhauer and Gertrude Stein, poodle lovers include Victor Hugo, Lillian Hellman, George Sand, Norman Mailer—who once got into a street brawl with a man who called his poodle “a queer”—and John Steinbeck, whose standard poodle Charley was his close companion for many years, and costar of his 1962 book Travels with Charley. However, outranking even the poodle among literary and artistic types is the dachshund (see LUMP and QUININE), breed of choice for Henry James, Matthew Arnold, Dorothy Parker, G. K. Chesterton, Anton Chekhov, Vladimir Nabokov, Pablo Picasso, and David Hockney, among others. Dachshunds are said to be complex, vulnerable, and fussy, and they’re often described as having an “artistic temperament.” Like dog, like master.
In light of my feelings for Grisby, I find it hard to imagine owning any breed other than the bulldog. As the only dog I’ve ever known, Grisby is my Atma, the universal soul of dog, the ideal essence, which, according to Schopenhauer’s Platonic notion of true forms, exists both before and after each imperfect manifestation. Plato would disagree; he’d claim that only the idea of the dog is real, and Grisby is a flawed copy of the unchangeable and original essence. But how could he know? As far as I’m aware, Plato didn’t have a warm bulldog on his lap, licking his knees as he wrote.
BULL’S-EYE IS THE dog belonging to Bill Sikes, the vicious thug in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. The dog is often assumed to be a bull terrier (the 2007 Random House Vintage edition of Oliver Twist has a white bull terrier on the cover, and the current Wikipedia entry for Bill Sikes claims that “he owns a bull terrier named Bull’s Eye”). The source of the error is probably the 1968 musical film Oliver!, in which the role of Bull’s-eye was played by a barrel-bodied bull terrier named Butch. In the Dickens novel, however, no breed is mentioned; Bull’s-eye is described as “a white shaggy dog, with his face scratched and torn in twenty different places.” Early illustrators like George Cruikshank drew Sikes’s companion as a scrappy, underfed mongrel. Incidentally, the modern, long-faced bull terrier is a hybrid that didn’t exist in 1838, when Dickens was writing Oliver Twist.
In the novel, man and dog are bound together, both victims of a cruel upbringing, both unpredictably violent. The two brutes share more than similar-sounding names; Bull’s-eye has “faults of temper in common with his owner,” yet the pair are inseparable, and Bull’s-eye, who sleeps at Sikes’s feet or by his side, is always ready to obey his master’s whims. The Artful Dodger describes Bull’s-eye as the “downiest of the lot” in Fagin’s establishment, adding: “He wouldn’t so much as bark in a witness-box for fear of committing himself; no, not if you