Gotta name 'em all...Better.

Wouldn't it be awesome to name something? To discover some island off the coast of Madagascar and get to call it whatever you want? Or to find some new type of bug in a cave in your backyard and get to choose what it would called for ever and ever? Wouldn't that be awesome?

Yes, it would.

When I was a kid I wondered once whether God had different names for all the animals than we did. Does He call a Zebra a Zebra? What did He call it before humans ever made a name for it? We discover new animals all the time, does He just call them what he knows they're going to be named, or does he have a special name for everything that we don't know (that's probably it, actually).

If that's the case, what happens to all those Alpha Taxonomists when they get to heaven? Is it basically like, "I know you spent your entire life classifying every living thing, but here's the updated list" *hands them giant book*.

That would suck.

I was quite a Pokemon fan in my younger (read: current) days. As a wee child I would always be amazed at how awesome all the names were. I wondered what sort of creative genius they must have holed up in their Tokyo laboratory, agonizing day in and day on just the right name for each individual Pokemon.

I imagined that he looked something like a cross between this guy:




And this one:


\


(Am I the only one who thinks he has an eerie resemblance to Henry B. Eyering?)


It was only later in life that I realized the Pokemon names were more likely made up by this guy:





Armed with only a Japanese-to-English dictionary and a rudimentary knowledge of zoological classifications, (perhaps his father was an Alpha Taxonomist), this boy was able to single handedly name all 150 Pokemon in my Pokedex.

For instance he might have seen this Pokemon:



And said to himself: ラット!


After he plugged that into his translator, he would have said: RAT!


しかし、あまりにも不足していると、それは長くする必要があります!


 *Translating*


"But that is too short, I must make it longer!"

So he would have carefully drawn out several more letters, probably on this paper.

Then, with a smile on his face, he would hold up his final product.

Rattata.

149 to go.