Mardi Link: A pickle by any other name
Mar. 7—My dog is the exact color of a sweet potato.
And after a year of working from home, within sight of the treat jar, she's also shaped like one.
"Tater," I sometimes call her; it's her COVID name.
When she was a puppy she had the girth of a yam, just not the length.
She came from Kalamazoo, I met the breeder in the parking lot of the Big Rapids Holiday Inn, and before merging back onto 131 North, I'd decided on her name: Olive.
Social media — specifically, a Facebook group called the "Dogspotting Society"— has provided a new look at naming your dog.
As in, a lot of people need assistance doing it.
"I need help naming my new boy! He's a collie. I'm pretty down with Gaelic and old timey names," writes Tess from Virginia.
There are 1.1 million members of the Dogspotting Society who offered many fine suggestions — 436 at last count, including Finn, Thor, Murtaugh, Hamish and Bruce.
Over on the "Michigan Corgi Club" page, its six weeks until Emily can bring her puppy home. She's waffling between Muffin, Huckleberry, Noodles or Pancake.
"Maple!" agreed several of the 50-plus commenters.
This decision-making angst, I've come to understand, is only the tip of a new bag of kibble.
Psychologists from Penn State, UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles and the National Academy of Sciences in Washington D.C. all studied a phenomenon they call "decision fatigue."
What to name your corgi puppy or collie rescue isn't in the data.
Or if it is, results weren't included in their published studies.
Instead, they focused on the decision-making most of us once did easily, such as whether to cook or get take out, what book to read, what movie to watch.
What the psychologists found, was that during the pandemic, these and other previously simple decisions have taken on an unprecedented uncertainty because the information we use to make them keeps changing.
Before COVID, whether or not to go to the grocery store or attend a holiday party wasn't a potentially life or death choice for ourselves, our families and people we didn't know but would surely encounter.
One warm fuzzy — in isolation, people aren't just using social media to snarl at each other. They're also using it to reach out and connect in positive ways.
Like Jordan of Atlanta, who needs a name for her pibble puppy.
For the uninitiated, "pibble," is a nickname for pitbull — a combo of pitbull, potato and hippo, intended to capture the much-maligned breed's goofy nature.
What is the right number of corgis for me? I can't decide.
I already know what I'd name him, though: Pickle.
Email Record-Eagle Senior Reporter Mardi Link at mlink@record-eagle.com.
