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Pet's Homage Name - TV Tropes

️Wed May 21 2014

It's a simple way to provide characterization: if you're highly educated and/or sophisticated you give a similar name to your pet. A popular scientist to name cats after is Erwin Schrödinger, best known for his Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment. Popular enough to be a Stock Animal Name.

It doesn't have to be a scientist naming the cat for another scientist. If you're an expert in a given field, you give an appropriate name to the pet. A musician may name the dog after a famous composer, a literature professor name the cat for an ancient king, a physicist name the ferret "Proton", etc. You're just too damn intelligent to own a dog named Rover or a parrot named Polly.

Often a Sub-Trope of Named After Somebody Famous, when using famous, historic names. Could also overlap with Formally-Named Pet, should some egghead name the dog Professor Einstein.

See also We Named the Monkey "Jack", when the homage is to a personal friend/relative/acquaintance.

Not to be confused with Tribute to Fido, which is when a name is a homage to a pet.

Examples:

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Anime & Manga

In Get Backers, Madoka Otowa is a Blind Musician that gets guided around by a seeing eye corgi that she named Mozart.
Moriarty the Patriot: Mycroft has a pet bird named "Mr. Charles Dickens" which he calls Charlie.

Comic Book

Ant-Man: Hank Pym sometimes named ants after musicians he liked, most notably the trio he used to explore inside Vision, who were Crosby, Stills and Nash. Scott Lang has also named ants after celebrities, including musicians, but his first ants were Emma and Steed, and he later followed this up with Purdey and Gambit.
In Lori Lovecraft, struggling actress Lori's cat is named Keaton in honour of Buster Keaton.

Comic Strips

In Zits, Jeremy adopts a cat he names 'Clapton'.

Film — Animated

In April and the Extraordinary World, April's cat is named Darwin, after Charles Darwin. As a member of a family of renegade scientists who refuse to work for the Empire, it is not surprising that she names her pet after a great scientist.
The Sword in the Stone: Merlin's Familiar is an owl named Archimedes.

Film — Live-Action

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen: Baron Munchausen's horse is named Bucephalus, thus making this trope Older Than Radio.
Doc Brown in the Back to the Future film trilogy names his dogs after famous scientists. In 1985, his dog is called Einstein, and in 1955, his dog is called Copernicus. In 1885, his horse is called Copernicus.
The titular dog in Beethoven. His family decided on the name when he seemed to react positively as the youngest girl, Emily, began playing Beethoven's 5th Symphony on the piano. In the sequel, one of his puppies is named Tchaikovsky.
In Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, inventor Caratacus Potts has a dog named Edison.
Crazy Rich Asians: Peik Lin's Nouveau Riche mother named her Mister Muffykins dogs Astor, Vanderbilt and Rockefeller, after rich American families.
Eleanor from Do Revenge named her emotional support dragon Oscar Winner Olivia Colman.
In Elvira, Mistress of the Dark this trope is used as one of many small gauges of the lead's average smarts. Elvira has an Unexpected Inheritance of a mansion, "cookbook", and a poodle. Her great aunt, a powerful, savvy witch, named him Algonquin after the American Indian tribe. Elvira is much more Earthy and neither dumb or brainy, so she shortens his name to Gonk.
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, bumbling inventor Wayne Szalinski has a dog named Quark.
In The Hunt (2020), the pig is named Orwell, because the hunters are drawing symbolism from Animal Farm.
At the end of The Interview, David Skylark revealed that he named his Cavalier Spaniel puppy after the late Kim Jong-un.
The Ronald Reagan-themed killer in The Tripper has a pack of attack dogs trained to attack hippies, one of whom is named 'George W.'.

Literature

Both Can Be True has a Pomeranian named Chewbarka.
In Call Me Sunflower, the Applebaums' cats are named Aristotle, Copernicus, and Einstein.
Crazy Rich Asians: The Nouveau Riche Gohs named their dogs Astor, Vanderbilt and Trump, after rich Americans.
The Door into Summer: Dan, the brilliant engineer on the cutting edge of domestic robotics, named his cat Petronius the Arbiter.
In The Golden Hamster Saga, Mr. John named his whistling guinea pigs Enrico and Caruso.
In The Great Balloon Race, Professor Aristotle Pilaster's Canine Companion is named Plato.
Harry Potter:
- Harry names his owl Hedwig, "a name he had found in A History of Magic." The author took the name from Saint Hedwig, patron saint of orphans.
- As per the movie props, Hermione might have named her cat Crookshanks after the in-universe figure from the 16th century, Poderick Crookshank.
In Heart In Hand, Alex names a stray cat "Gary" after the unpopular NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, because he has "dark hair, a funny face, and a really really tiny..."
In the Alternate History novel How Few Remain, Samuel Clemens (a Mark Twain that never adopted the moniker and instead became a journalist in San Francisco) names his dog "Sutro" after the city mayor, Adolph Sutro. When Sutro's inactivity leads to the city being invaded by the British, Clemens comments that the shared name is actually more insulting for the dog.
Discouraged in How NOT to Write a Novel, noting that if your novel's protagonist must have a cat, do not name it after a composer (such as Bartok), after a writer (Hemingway), after an ancient Greek (Socrates) or after a person that reflects the character's political leanings (Trotsky), among several other examples.
In Mr. Popper's Penguins the first penguin the Poppers receive ends up being named Captain Cook after British explorer, James Cook.
In A Murder Is Announced, Rev. Julian Harmon, an Oxford alumnus, named his cat after an Assyrian king.
In The Murder Of Bindy Mackenzie, Bindy actually suggests this as a study tip.
BINDY MACKENZIE'S STUDY TIPS #6
Rename your pets.
Say you have a dog and a goldfish?
Rename your dog Nicholas II.
The Once and Future King is the novel that The Sword in the Stone was adapted from. Like the Disney film, Merlin's Familiar is an owl named Archimedes.
The Pants Project: Liv's mamma was born in Italy, so the family dog is named Garibaldi.
In the Repairman Jack series, Abe is a gun-dealer and technical expert on firearms; gun design, mechanical specifications, upkeep, customization, and repair. He'd probably have found a great job in the industry if he wasn't so determined to remain independent. He calls his pet parakeet Parabellum, the name of a specific type of cartridge.
In The Salmon of Doubt, one of Dirk Gently's current cases is working out the name of a dog. He eventually realises that, since the late owner was writing a biography of Søren Kierkegaard , he would therefore probably have named the dog Kierkegaard, because it's a huge stress reliever to turn to it and say "Oh, shut up, Kierkegaard!"
Charlie from The Someday Birds names his dog Tiberius, after the ornithologist Tiberius Shaw, PhD.
Conversational Troping in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, which tells you to ignore the page that says "For Barbie and Greta and Albert Einstein and Auntie May", even if you're wondering if "Albert Einstein" is actually Albert Einstein, or just the writer's dog.
Wild Orchid: In Waiting for No One, Taylor names her gerbil Harold Pinter after her favorite playwright. After Harold Pinter gives birth, Taylor keeps one of the babies and names him Samuel Beckett.
Charlie from The Wild Way Home has a cat named Howard Carter. He used to have another one named King Tut.
Young Sherlock Holmes: Duke Balthasar, the Big Bad of Red Leech, is the leader of 'the Government in Exile of the Confederacy'. He has two semi-tamed cougars he calls Grant and Sherman, in what he admits is a kind of sick joke.

Live-Action TV

When Liz Lemon of 30 Rock is threatening to give up looking for love and succumb to being a Crazy Cat Lady:
In The Big Bang Theory, after a breakup with not-his-girlfriend Amy Farrah Fowler, theoretical physicist Sheldon Cooper gets a cat that he names Dr. Robert Oppenheimer and takes him everywhere. Soon Sheldon becomes a Crazy Cat Gentleman and gets an entire Manhattan Project of cats — Fermi, Feynman, Teller, Frisch, and Odd Name Out Zazzles, because that cat is so zazzy.
B.J. and the Bear is about Billie Joe "B.J." McKay, a professional freelance itinerant trucker who travels the country's highways in a red and white Kenworth K-100 Aerodyne with his pet chimpanzee Bear (named after Bear Bryant, the famed football coach for the University of Alabama).
On Blackish, Dre's sister Rhonda and her wife Sharon have a cat called 'Kitty Lang'.
Clarissa Explains It All has an episode where Ferguson, her Insufferable Genius brother, finds a lost cat that he names William F. Buckley.
- Likewise, Clarissa herself has a pet alligator named "Elvis".
An episode of Columbo, the victim was a talented musician who had named her bird Chopin.
Doctor Who: In "Image of the Fendahl", archeologist Adam Colby calls his dog Leakey. The intent by writer Chris Boucher was that he was named after archeologist Louis Leakey, but he later realised a dog named Leakey suggested something else entirely. The novelisation by Terrance Dicks claims it's both.
His name was partly a tribute to the famous anthropologist, partly a reference to an unfortunate habit of occasionally forgetting his house-training.
Downton Abbey: All three dogs—Pharaoh, Isis & Tiaa—belonging to the Crawley family have names that are references to Ancient Egypt, and were likely chosen in tribute to the Earl of Carnarvon (real life owner of Highclere Castle AKA the Abbey) who financed Howard Carter's expedition.
Due South: Canadian Mountie Benton Fraser named his wolf Deifenbecker, after former Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbecker.
Father Ted: Dougal names his rabbit Sampras, after Pete Sampras, owing to "the obvious rabbits-tennis connection."
In Glee, The Dalton Academy Warblers each receive a canary after making the choir. The one Kurt is given is named Pavarotti, after the famed singer.
In Hardball, tween-Alpha Bitch Tiffany owns a pair of cavoodles named Ricky and Martin.
In The InBESTigators, science geek Ezra has a pet goldfish named Neil Armstrong.
Jonathan Creek: A minor character whose fascination with Classical Greek mythology plays a minor role in solving the mystery of the week owns a goldfish called Tiresias.
In Modern Family, it's mentioned that part of Mitchell's Transparent Closet as a child was naming his pet bird Fly-za Minelli and his pet snake Zsa Zsa Gaboa.
In My Place, Mohammed is into cricket and describes himself as 'a mad keen bowler'; he named his goldfish after Shane Warne and talks to it as if it were the actual cricket player.
Sliders: In the first episode, Quinn- the inventor/discoverer of Sliding- mentions his cat named Schrödinger.
Star Trek: Enterprise: Capt. Jonathan Archer's pet beagle is named Porthos as he was from a litter of four puppies all named after the heroes from The Three Musketeers (Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and D'Artagnan).
Stargate SG-1 had Samantha Carter, the team The Smart Guy, owning a cat named Schrödinger, which she gave to Narim early on.
In Starsky & Hutch, Huggy Bear names one of his racing mice Cheesebiscuit.
Tales from the Crypt: In "Dead Right", Madame Vorna's dog is named 'Trotsky'.
The Twilight Zone (1959): In "I Dream of Genie", George P. Hanley's dog Attila is named after Attila the Hun.
The Twilight Zone (1985): In "Little Boy Lost", the photojournalist Carol Shelton's cat is named Ansel after Ansel Adams.
The West Wing: Mathematics professor Talmidge Cregg has a cat named Nicodemus.
The X-Files had Scully, whose background is in hard science like medicine and physics, owning a dog named Queequeg, a reference to one of the Characters in Moby-Dick. (Her family has Navy connections, and she and her father shared a fondness for that novel.)
Zoey 101: In "Defending Dustin", Chase and Michael adopt a dog that they name "Elvis".

Puppet Shows

On The Muppets (2015), Miss Piggy brings back a baby penguin from her vacation to Argentina. She names it Gloria Estefan because it was the only Spanish name she could think of at the time.

Radio

In Ed Reardon's Week, Reardon is a witty, down on his luck writer, whose Intelligence Equals Isolation. The only friend he has is the cat, named after Edward Elgar.
I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue: One round of "Limerick" unfolded thusly:
Humphrey Lyttelton: "My hamster is called Otis Redding..."
Graeme Garden: "My goldfish is Joan Armatrading..."
Tim Brooke-Taylor: "My dogs are The Platters..."
Barry Cryer: "Not that that matters..."
Willie Rushton: "No, we're all up to here with the wedding."

Toys

Video Games

In Half-Life 2, Dr. Kleiner has a "de-beaked" headcrab named after Hedy Lamarr. It's both a bad Stealth Pun and a Shout-Out to a classic actress- one who helped pioneer early wi-fi and cordless technologies.
Skullgirls' Peacock is a huge fan of cartoons, so it's natural that her little bird sidekick, Avery, takes his name from one of the most famous animators of the medium (and also a pun on Aviary).
In Team Fortress 2, The Medic owns a pet dove named Archimedes, but he runs more in the Mad Scientist direction, gleefully describing how he once stole a live patient's skeleton.

Webcomics

Dr. Frost: Befitting a psychologist, when Frost adopts a puppy, he ends up naming him Pavlov.
Dora in Questionable Content has a cat named Miéville.

Web Originals

Sam, a time traveler in The Bright Sessions, has a cat named Darwin which she obtained after a trip to the Galapagos where she saw the real deal.

Western Animation

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids are a pop band. Their Team Pet is a dog named Elvis.
Fillmore!: Fillmore has a goldfish named Thelonius (after jazz musician Thelonius Monk). After Thelonious dies, he is replaced by a goldfish named Miles (after Miles Davis).
In The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius, the titular boy genius designed and built his robot dog and named him Goddard in honor of rocket science physicist and inventor Robert Goddard. Especially apt when, in his first animated feature film, Jimmy is able to ride upon Goddard like a space bike.
In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012), the Rat King is a Mad Scientist with the power over rats, and names all of his rats after famous Greeks and Romans; such as Caligula for his giant rat steed and Aristotle for his seeing eye rat.
On Total Drama, Sierra and Topher are both huge fans of Chris McLean. Even before they met him, Sierra has multiple fish all named "Chris" while Topher's cat, Chef, is named after Chris' sidekick.