Ahh, cute words: One of the internet’s favorite things. We all know “doggo” and “birb”, but what about words for other animal groups? Like maybe feesh/fibsh for fish? What are some cute words and names for animals y’all have seen/come up with?
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Stingrays aka sea pancakes.
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Trash panda (raccoon)
Sometimes, what I learned as simply a common name could be taken as a cute nickname, such as inchworm (Geometrid larva) or woolly bear (Arctiine larva).
Then there are the names that were current among kids when I was a kid myself, which I only much later found out were not actual common names: sea ants (Idotea balthica).
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In Australia the pallid cuckoo is also known as the brainfever bird because of its annoying, repetitive call. Then there is the pobblebonk frog.
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I have occasionally seen jumping spiders referred to as ‘octokittens’ and then there’s ‘danger noodles’ and ‘sneks’ for snakes. I’ve seen at least one person on the internet calling slugs ‘slime bunnies’ but I’m not sure how widespread that one is.
Also, for those unfamiliar, Dogs Are Doggos: An Internet Language Built Around Love For The Puppers.
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Canada geese are cobra chickens!
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I don’t know who coined it but Rufous Hummingbird is known by some of my friends as Attila the Hum because of its aggressiveness against other hummingbirds at feeders when it migrates through my area.
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Attila the Hum!!! That’s amazing!
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Not really meme-ish, but… In Ireland the Wren (troglodytes troglodytes) is “the king of all birds”, a title it earned through trickery. And “the origin of the word wren in Irish is dreoilín, which means a trickster.”
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Another memetic name I’ve seen for them is “nope rope”
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The Eastern Musk Turtle, which produces a strong musky smell, has a couple of alternative names (which appear on its iNat page) that have fallen out of favor but I still like to use when the opportunity arises: Stinkpot and Stinking Jim. The latter I probably should find personally offensive, but I don’t.
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Hmmm… did that happen before or after Octocat?
Which one – the 2008 animation or the 2014 GitHub logo?
Don’t have a lot of time at the moment to go digging around for the first usage of octokitten, but there are reddit posts using the term from five years ago (2017?) Link 1, Link 2
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