Schlumbergera seedlings: assorted

It's become clear that I'm not going to catch up on the Schlumbergera seedlings if I keep doing things the way I've been doing them. We're already five seedlings deep into the 2018-19 season,¹ and twenty-eight of the seedlings from 2017-18 are still waiting on names. So for this post, I'm going to settle as many of that twenty-eight as I can, with less explanation than usual.

375A Who's On First

Seed parent: NOID yellow

Explanation: Another one of the comedy-themed names I've given to the non-yellow offspring of the NOID yellow.

Also considered: Charo, Counselor Troi, Divoon

*
155A Parachute In A Tree

Seed parent: NOID peach

Explanation: The lower half of this photo made me think of parachutes:

and I decided to run with it. It doesn't hurt that parachutes are often white.

Also considered: Anonymous Commenter, Frazil,² Lab Coat

*
137A Through The Wringer

Seed parent: NOID white

Explanation: First (only?) bloom looked like crap.

Also considered: Great Space, Spilled Milk, Twenty-Minute Lull

Comment: I am increasingly seeing "through the ringer" on-line because young people have no idea what wringer washers are and consequently have no basis for understanding the metaphor.³ Which makes me sad, because wringer washers are amazing and terrifying. The manual ones are even environmentally friendly, and a pretty solid arm workout. Maybe we should bring them back.

*
427A Clip Show

Seed parent: NOID magenta

Explanation: Clip shows are episodes of TV that are mainly constructed from excerpts (clips) of previous episodes, usually with a few minutes of a framing story. As far as I can remember, they were always terrible, but they were cheap to write and film, so a lot of shows wound up doing them occasionally. Not so much of a thing lately; I think the natural habitat of the clip show is the 1980s. Anyway. The analogy here is, episode of TV constructed from previously-seen clips = Schlumbergera seedling that looks like it was constructed from previous Schlumbergera seedlings.

Also considered: Cover Album, If You Can't Beat 'Em, Weighted Average

*
177A Ham And Cheese

Seed parent: NOID magenta

Explanation: Orange and pink seedling, ham is pink, cheese is (often) orange, Q.E.D.

Also considered: Middle Child, Polite Exasperation, You Look Familiar

*
019B Hidden Track

Seed parent: 'Caribbean Dancer'

Explanation: CDs sometimes would have, say, the 12 songs of the regular album, followed by like eighty short tracks with no sound, and then another bonus song at the end of the album, as like track 99 or whatever. Often these weren't included in the list of the album's songs. So sometimes you'd put an album in the CD player and get busy knitting a blanket or whatever, and the CD would run out but you were busy so you didn't want to get up to put another one on, and there'd be a long period of silence, and then suddenly a new song would start playing and it would startle you so badly you'd jam a knitting needle through your forearm. Sometimes there would be more than one bonus song at the end, sometimes the bonus track would be unlistenable garbage, sometimes they were the best things on the album (cf. Beck, Midnite Vultures, "Debra").

In this particular case, I've had the orange/white Schlumbergera 019A Belevenissen around for forever, and it's fine, but hasn't really done anything remarkable since it first bloomed, and then suddenly it turns out to have an unexpected second seedling in the pot with it that is orange/pink.

Also considered: Apollo, Double Date, Wishing For More Wishes

*
388A Buenaventura River

Seed parent: NOID yellow

Explanation: The Buenaventura River doesn't exist, but appears on maps made during the first half of the 1800s (more or less). The gist as I understand it is that people wanted very much for there to be a river in the west that would connect the interior of North America to the Pacific Ocean, in the same way that the Mississippi connects most of the eastern part of North America to the Gulf of Mexico. There was some additional confusion about things like The Great Salt Lake, which has no outlets to the sea, but . . . people felt like it really ought to drain to the Pacific somehow. So they decided that a Mississippi-caliber river must exist, and gave it a name, and put it on maps, and the whole deal.⁴

The connection to the seedling is that I wanted so badly to believe that this was something other than just one more orange seedling from the NOID yellow that for a while I was able to convince myself that it was a bit yellower than the other orange ones. But it's not: it's just orange.

Also considered: Déjà Vu, Et Tu Brute, Trieu Thi Trinh

*
183A Bonus Round

Seed parent: NOID magenta

Explanation: This was the first of several seedlings to bloom after May 2018.⁵

Also considered: n/a

*
123A Take Your Time

Seed parent: NOID white

Explanation: Not only did this one bloom unusually late in the season (31 July), it was unusually old (~4 years) to be producing a first flower.

Also considered: Jellybread, Stay Up Late

*
144A Diaphanous Gown

Seed parent: NOID peach

Explanation: Was suggested in comments some time back, though I can't find the comment again to credit the person who proposed it. I want to say it was Paul?

Also considered: Avalanche, Carrie Fisher, Spirit And Image.

Comment: I initially wanted Spirit And Image, which the dialect dictionary says is the original version of "spitting image." Which made sense to me. If you say someone is the spitting image of another person, you mean that they're similar in temperament (spirit) and appearance (image), so I was pleased to have that explanation, since the saying has bothered me for a long time. However, when I attempted to confirm this on-line, I ran into things that said no, it probably actually was "spit" originally, and the meaning was that they share appearance (image) and physical composition (spit). Though you would sort of think that appearance and physical composition would often be basically the same thing. So I wound up more confused than I was originally. It's probably all just as well, since Spirit And Image would have made it harder for me to remember the seed parent: I would have assumed that 144A and its seed parent were both white/white, but in fact the seed parent is the NOID peach.

Let's do two more and then call it a post.

*
236A Only God Can Judge Me

Seed parent: 025A "Clownfish"

Explanation: Mostly this one's just a reference to a person from my life, though it was also a messier-than-average flower. The above photo doesn't show it so much, but it was sloppier a couple weeks later.

Also considered: Sorry Occifer, Vocal Fry, Your Other Left

*
473A Je Me Souviens

Seed parent: 082A "Strawberry Madeleine"

Explanation: A previously-considered personal reference; also the provincial motto of Quebec. Neither has much connection to this individual seedling, but I thought the name and color suited one another.

Also considered: Cantaloupe Candy, Minnesota Nice, Sodium Vapor

So okay. Twelve down, sixteen more to go, and then we can do the 2017-18 Schlummies.

I mean, don't hold your breath, but the Schlummies just got a lot closer.

-

¹ (383A, 384A, 423A, 437A, and 469A)
² (From the dialect dictionary; 1930s term for a mixture of water and ice crystals. I'm not clear if this means water with ice crystals growing through it, or broken up ice and water, i.e., "slush." The book doesn't specify.)
³ Though what are they picturing, then, when they type "through the ringer?"
⁴ There was probably also confusion about the precise locations of existing rivers -- it's not as though you encounter a river once and then automatically know where it goes from there, and they didn't have satellite data to work from, so a bit of guessing and extrapolating was probably unavoidable. Also, I'd like to think that those using the maps probably understood that some of it was guesswork, though historical people are often very disappointing, so maybe not.
⁵ In the past, it's usually been safe to assume that by 31 May, I will have seen all the Schlumbergera flowers I'm going to see for that year. Though there have been exceptions before, especially in the basement: its seasons don't have much connection to the natural ones.

Schlumbergera seedlings 196 and 125

No promises, but I might be back again for a bit. We'll see how it goes.

Seedling 196A isn't that exciting to look at. Orange / light pink, a bit less orange than usual but otherwise pretty typical. It mostly distinguishes itself in the number and timing of the blooms: like 025A Clownfish, it appears to be unusually insensitive to day length and temperature, and is willing to set buds much more freely than the average Schlumbergera. Which is a desirable trait, so I was hoping to find a really good name for it.

But I don't think I did. The name finalists: Can't Slow Down, Fred Rogers, Lady Boyle's Last Party, and No You Hang Up First.

Can't Slow Down is just a reference to the unusual amount of blooming. Fred Rogers is the television personality, previously considered for 062A Open World but rejected on the grounds that I couldn't be certain that there wasn't already a Schlumbergera named for him somewhere out there. (Which I suppose is still a concern, but I'm less worried about it this year.)

Lady Boyle's Last Party will need some unpacking. It's the name of one of the chapters in the video game Dishonored. The actual story is pretty ugly (if you're interested, you can read a summary at the Dishonored wiki), but the way the space is designed, and the artwork that goes along with it, are so amazing that I think it may be my favorite chapter of any video game I've ever played.¹ (Some non-violent, non-gross art examples can be seen here and here.) I've used game-related names before,² and Dishonored is great (my only complaint is that it's too short), so eventually there will be a Dishonored-related name, even if it's not this one.

No You Hang Up First is a roundabout reference to how hard it was to settle on four name finalists. Sometimes you just have to let the thing be done, even if you sort of want to keep going.

So. No You Hang Up First was sort of always intended to be a throwaway option; the rules say that there have to be four names to choose from, so I needed a fourth name.³ And Lady Boyle's Last Party is problematic in a number of ways, the main three being that it's awfully long, the storyline that goes with it is kinda icky, and the dominant colors in the level are browns and golds (which is striking partly because the game is otherwise primarily blue and gray), not vivid orange.

Which leaves us with Can't Slow Down or Fred Rogers, and Can't Slow Down is a bit abstract. Plus we don't actually know that 196A can't slow down. It hasn't so far, but the name shouldn't be making promises like that. So this one will be 196A Fred Rogers.


Seedling 125A is yet another white child of the NOID white; it doesn't do anything particularly interesting, and it's likely that I'm going to wind up selling or discarding it. What I decide to call it until then doesn't matter very much.

The name finalists are: Effet De Neige, Glass Slipper, Mae West, and Weighted Companion Cube.

Weighted Companion Cube is yet another video game reference (again to Portal). It has in its favor that the coloration of the flower (white / pink) is similar to the coloration of the video game object (light gray / pink), and that's about it.

Mae West was previously considered for 290A Our Lady Of Assumption, 067A Cyndi Lauper, and 133A Fading Commotion.

Effet De Neige means "effect of snow" in French, and is an art reference. I'm not really qualified to talk about art history and consequently won't try, but my understanding is that the French Impressionists got really into snow for a few decades in the late 1800s, leading to works like Vue de toits (Effet de neige) (Gustave Caillebotte, 1878):

Effet de neige (Gustave Courbet, 1860s):

La Pie (Claude Monet, 1868-69):

Effet de neige à Petit-Montrouge (Édouard Manet, 1870):

Paysage d'hiver (Le chemin, neige) (Robert Antoine Pinchon, 1905)

and so on. I mean, we could look at French Impressionist snow all day,⁴ but we've got seedlings to name.

There's also Glass Slipper, which was considered and rejected for 193A Arcade Gannon and 135A Chiune Sugihara,⁵ and sort of considered for 290A Our Lady Of Assumption.

So I'll drop Weighted Companion Cube on the grounds that it's long, and there's already a Portal-related seedling. Very tempted by Effet De Neige, but having looked at all the paintings now, I'm sort of inclined toward holding that name in reserve for a prettier white seedling. Which leaves us with Mae West or Glass Slipper, and of the two, I think Glass Slipper is the more disposable name. So we'll go with 125A Glass Slipper.

-

¹ Though most of the competition is probably also from Dishonored, and what isn't is probably from Half-Life 2, which had the same art director, Viktor Antonov. Apparently I'm just really on his wavelength.
² Games in general: 062A Open World; 424A Speedrun.
Fallout: New Vegas: 193A Arcade Gannon
Half-Life 2: 107A Nova Prospekt; 379A Can't Find The World
Pac-Man: 067B Clyde
Portal series: 072A Chell
³ Yes, they're my rules, and I could change them if I wanted, but . . . I preferred to add a fourth option that I knew I wasn't going to pick, instead of proceeding with only three options. *shrug*
⁴ (All of the paintings were public domain images from Wikipedia, by the way.)
⁵ Which has unexpectedly died as of a couple weeks ago; I don't know what the problem was. It's really unusual for the Schlumbergeras to die on me if they've lived long enough to bloom, though it also happened with 042A Mary Tyler Moore, last year. 042A was always a little weak-seeming, so I wasn't shocked, but 135A had seemed perfectly normal. So I'm puzzled.

Random plant events: Leuchtenbergia principis, Zamia furfuracea

Everything was going fine, and then it was time to dig up the Cannas and bring them in for the winter. And you've seen the Cannas.¹

As of 18 October, direct-weighing on a bathroom scale has given us the approximate figure of 787 lb. (357 kg) of Canna rhizomes brought inside for the winter, and we haven't even dug them all up yet.² My best guess is that another 200-300 lb. (91-136 kg) remain to be dug up.

Meanwhile, one of the Leuchtenbergia seedlings has decided to bloom, in the basement, under artificial lights. I'm surprised that this is even possible.

The seedling in question was sown on 8 May 2013, so it's about five and a half years old. In some ways that feels like a really long time to wait for a bloom, and in other ways it feels incredibly fast. (It's not as if Leuchtenbergia is known for its speed.)

Also, I purchased four kinds of seeds from seedman.com at the beginning of September. Three of them are sort of disappointing. There's nothing at all going on with Chamaedorea cataractum, and one of the six seeds in that package was rotten when it arrived, so I kind of suspect that was wasted money. A few seeds of Ficus religiosa and Ficus benghalensis have germinated, but they're developing slowly and I'm not optimistic about getting actual plants of either one.³

But the fourth one, Zamia furfuracea, is doing more or less what it's supposed to.

I have germination on eight of the ten seeds so far, and it's only been four or five weeks (the first seed to germinate, photographed below, took 26 days; the package instructions said to allow "several weeks to a few months"), so I'm hopeful about the other two.

Not that the Zamias are much to look at so far. But still. It's something.

I have no idea when I might get back to regular posting again.

-

¹ (Well, some of the Cannas. There were a lot of Cannas.)
² Also, this omits a box with about 35-40 lb. of Cannas that we just gave to a total stranger because he stopped at the house and asked. (He knew we had them because we piled all the cut stalks on the curb, in hopes that the city will eventually take them away for us, and the pile was kind of . . . unmissable, I guess is the word.)
³ Though you never know. I tried F. religiosa once many years ago, and got at least one plant that survived long enough to develop some leaves. It didn't transition to a pot well, probably because I was asking it to go too long between waterings. There's probably a reason people don't normally grow these species indoors anyway; I just thought it might be fun to try. (It hasn't been.)

Schlumbergera seedlings 130, 160, 187, and 402

Okay, well. There was never any danger of getting through all of the 2017-18 Schlumbergeras before the 2018-19 ones started to bloom, but as of a few days ago I'm officially a season behind: the first blooms from 423A and 437A have happened, with substantial buds on two more seedlings (469A and 472A). I can't catch up, but I can at least try not to fall further behind, so we have four seedlings to name today.

Seedling 130A, from the NOID white:

Name finalists: Barn Owl, I've Said Too Much, Myrtha,¹ Serenity Prayer.²

I'm fond of barn owls, and this does have nice clean curves that makes Barn Owl seem somehow appropriate, but it turns out that they're not always the snowy white I was imagining: sometimes they're brown. So maybe not. And I've forgotten how I've Said Too Much got on the list in the first place.

I'm going with 130A Myrtha, mostly based on it being shorter to type than Serenity Prayer. Though I bet Serenity Prayer is going to keep coming back until it gets used.


Seedling 160A, from the NOID peach somehow:

It's not amazing or anything, but it's a different coloration than usual, so I'm fond of it despite all the thrips damage.

Name finalists: Bite Tongue Deep Breath,³ Composition In Red & Pink, Just Lucky I Guess, Roseate Spoonbill.

I should perhaps explain a couple of those. I had the idea several months back that I should look at paintings for name ideas, since artists have to come up with names for things all the time and maybe some of those would be worth stealing. Unfortunately, the book we had available to consult was a book about modern art, primarily, and an awful lot of modern art has stupid titles. Lots of "Untitled" and "Composition" and "Self-Portrait." So it didn't really work out for me, but Composition In Red & Pink is just short enough to be workable if I allow the ampersand, so what the hell, let's try it. It's not going to be usable for any other blooms, because "red" and "pink" are as short as Schlumbergera-relevant color names get. And of course the Roseate Spoonbill is the bird, which is more or less these colors, though in different proportions, so it kind of works.

I think I want to save Roseate Spoonbill for a better color match -- surely a red/pink/white will come along eventually -- and Just Lucky I Guess is kinda meh. In the end, I think I like the pretentiousness of 160A Composition In Red & Pink.


Seedling 187A, from the NOID magenta:

Name finalists: Funny Farm, Mister Orange, Perp Walk, Replacement Goldfish.

Funny Farm is a bit insensitive, now (it's a slang term for a psychiatric hospital), though it's meant as a reference to someone from my life, in which context it's less so. (Explaining would make the reference more explicit than I'm comfortable with.) Mister Orange is more or less a reference to Tim Roth's character in Reservoir Dogs, a movie I used to really love but haven't seen in a long time for fear that it wouldn't hold up well. Perp Walk is sort of a reference to orange prison jumpsuits, though now that I've included it on the list, I'm realizing that a) it's also sort of insensitive, and b) it doesn't really even work as a reference, since normally the perp walk happens well before the jumpsuit. And then Replacement Goldfish is the trope, which hopefully is familiar enough that you don't need me to explain it.

So. Replacement Goldfish is a bit darker, as a trope, than I was thinking when it went on the list, and Perp Walk doesn't work, so it's a choice between media nostalgia and personal nostalgia for me, and I guess personal nostalgia should win, even though it looks insensitive. So 187A Funny Farm. I can always change it if it bothers me later.


Finally, seedling 402A, also a nice-looking white seedling from the NOID white:

Name finalists: Booster Separation,⁴ Cirrus, Magician's Dove,⁵ Sinclair Lewis.

Cirrus is the meteorological designation for high, thin, wispy clouds, which I imagine this seedling resembles. Sinclair Lewis is the first author from the U.S. to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1930); I read a few of his novels back in high school (Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry), and the only one that really stuck with me at all was Arrowsmith, which I really enjoyed. I don't know how Lewis is thought of currently; people seemed to like him at the time he was writing, but he's a lot less famous now than his contemporaries Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Wikipedia suggests that Arrowsmith, at least, is still read occasionally, and I've seen plenty of references to It Can't Happen Here recently though I'm not sure how many people have actually read it. (I haven't.)

I don't think I knew before reading the Wikipedia entry for Sinclair Lewis that he was a redhead (or if I knew, I had forgotten), so I'll save the name for a red-orange seedling. The other three all reference the shape and color of the bloom to some degree or another, and I think Cirrus works best, or is at least easiest to type, so we'll go with 402A Cirrus.

-

¹ (previously considered for 122A Tickly-Benders)
² (previously considered for 136A Khutulun)
³ (previously considered for 281A No Bad Vibez)
⁴ (previously considered for 062A Open World)
⁵ (previously considered for 119A There Would Be Peace and 136A Khutulun)

Anthurium no. 1352 "Queen Bee Luscious"

Queen Bee Luscious is unusually difficult to photograph, because her spathes have a very pronounced saddle shape to them.

Or at least usually they do: the first bloom looked more or less normal. Except for the missing spadix.

As mentioned in the post for 1323 Kayla Stratus, QBL also has a lot of thrips damage, which is really disappointing.

On the positive side, she's produced a lot of blooms under nonideal conditions, and I feel like if the thrips weren't involved and she could consistently remember to make a spadix, I'd think of the inflorescences as "pretty." (As it is, the thought is more potentially pretty.)

The foliage is surprisingly unblemished:

And there's a decent amount of it (at least, there was last November when the photo was taken):

Though the internodal distance is a bit of a problem, as it was with 'Joli,' the seed parent. So I'll keep her, but she could also be doing better.

QBL is one of the seedlings in line to be promoted to a 6-inch pot the next time I have room to do that: maybe she'll handle herself a bit better once that's happened.

Side note about the blog: I'm probably going to have to slow down or stop for a little while after this post, as life has become a bit unmanageable again. Everything is fine; I just can't keep up.

Schlumbergera seedling no. 377

337A is the other exciting new thing from the 2017-18 seedlings, along with 392A Subjunctive. It's similar to Subjunctive but not quite the same:

Basically the same coloration, but where Subjunctive is magenta, 377A is light pink. I personally like this one slightly better, on the grounds that I think the yellow and pink harmonize a little better with one another than the yellow and magenta, but obviously they're both nice. I shouldn't be trying to pick favorites.

Anyway. The name candidates this time are so weird that only one of them makes any kind of sense on the surface, and one of them doesn't even make sense after you find out where it came from. We have: 52-Hertz Whale, Butterchange My Stranger, Neatrup, and Nesh.

Two of those are from the dialect dictionary.

Neatrup is the spelling I like best out of the four given. The definition given by the book, with some formatting changes:

netop, neatrup, eat-up, meet-up, n. A friend. Cf. "Folk Ety."¹

1829-30 Mass. netop = friend, crony. Indian wd. Dunglison Glossary.
1850 e.Mass meet-ups, pl.
1932 & before s.w.Conn. Danbury 'They are great eat-ups (or neatrups).' Said of 2 persons having a sudden violent affection for each other. Used in one family, esp. by a 93-year-old woman.
1934 netop. Algonquian wd. Used in salutation to an Indian by Amer. colonists. Web.

I mean, I don't know how strongly the seedling feels about me, but "violent affection" isn't far from how I feel about it. So it kind of works.

For what it's worth, I did poke around a little bit on-line to see if I could find out what the original Algonquian word was, but failed.

Nesh is a bit simpler:

nesh, adj. Dainty, fragile.
1826-1900 N.Y.C. Educated. A. P. Terhune in N. Am. Rev. May, 1931.
1934 Obs. exc. dial.

The flower itself is no more dainty or fragile than any of the others, but I'd argue that the coloration is a little more delicate than the loud, blaring oranges we usually get. So it kind of works.

Butterchange My Stranger is the one that's not going to make sense even after I explain it: it's a Markov chain result² that I find appealing for reasons I don't entirely understand: I put the list of potential names I'd already come up with into this site, and Butterchange My Stranger was one of the options that got spit back out at me. I think the origin is from BUTTERCream Frosting + CHANGE MY STRide + the unintentional inclusion of Bible verses in the input data that included the word "stranger," presumably either Leviticus 19:33³ or Zechariah 7:10.^{4, 5}

I tried pretty hard to invent a way to make Butterchange My Stranger mean something, anything, but the best I could come up with was a very specific and weird situation in which two people, let's call them Alice and Bob, are in a diner, and two people neither of them know come in and order their food, which comes with pats of butter. Somehow in the course of talking, Alice and Bob wind up assigning each other strangers so they agree that one is Alice's stranger and one is Bob's stranger, and then Alice and Bob make a bet about who can replace their stranger's butter with margarine, or garlic butter, or some other butterlike substance which is not the original pat of butter. (I am coining the verb "to butterchange" here, meaning "to replace butter with some other butter.") So if you're Alice or Bob, you're thinking of your objective as being to now Butterchange My Stranger.

[beat]

Which is at minimum very, very weird. But, I don't know, something about the sound of it -- specifically, I think, the rhyme between "change" and "strange" -- appeals to me. And it doesn't hurt that we've got kind of a buttery light yellow in the flower. So . . . *shrug* . . . let's throw it into the list of options and see how it does. Why not. Worst that could happen is I wind up with a nonsensical name that requires explanation, and it's not as if that's never happened before.

Finally, the 52-Hertz Whale is a whale of unknown species that calls at the frequency of 52 hertz (52 cycles per second), a very low G-sharp or A-flat (Wikipedia says 52 Hz is just higher than the lowest note reachable by a tuba, if that gives you any idea of the note.). This is much higher in pitch than the calls of blue whales (10-39 Hz) or fin whales (20 Hz), and as far as anyone can tell, it is the only whale in the entire world which calls at this pitch. It was first recorded in 1989, in the Pacific, and its call has since deepened in pitch to 49 Hz, from G-sharp to G; researchers presume that this reflects the whale's growth.

The 52-Hertz whale moves at times, and for distances, suggesting that it may be a blue whale, though it doesn't seem to be moving as part of a group of blue whales; it might also be a blue/fin hybrid, a deaf blue whale, a group of whales, or the last survivor of some nearly-extinct whale species.

People have sort of latched on to the 52-Hertz whale's existence as a metaphor or whatever; there are a lot of articles out there referring to it as "the loneliest whale in the world,"⁶ and anthropomorphizing it, and . . . I mean, I get the appeal; surely most of us have felt at one time or another like we were not quite speaking the same language as everyone else. But we don't actually know that the 52-hertz whale is lonely: we're not even positive that it's singular. Maybe it's fine. One must imagine the 52-Hertz whale happy.

Anyway. 52-Hertz Whale could work as a name. It at least emphasizes the uniqueness of the color. There could be other seedlings that look like this down the road, but it's the only one we've seen in four years of doing this, so it's probably not a coloration we'll see a lot.

So. Where to even start. I guess I'll drop Nesh. It would work; I think the word and meaning even fit one another well.⁷ But whenever I imagine how I'd feel in the future, having chosen each of the four options, Nesh is somehow the most disappointing. And I like the meaning of Neatrup, but in that case I feel like the word and idea really don't match one another particularly well.

So we're left with Butterchange My Stranger or 52-Hertz Whale. 52-Hertz Whale has more of an explanation, is one syllable and ten characters shorter, is a bit more melancholy, and is probably less likely to age badly. (I worry that Butterchange My Stranger will appeal a lot less after the novelty has worn off.)

But I don't know. I'm feeling really drawn to Butterchange My Stranger. Maybe I will regret it later, maybe you'll all judge me, maybe six months from now competitive butterchanging of strangers will go viral and no one's butter will be safe anymore and it will be all my fault. Dumber things have happened, and I won't be able to say that I didn't see viral butterchanging coming. I suppose if I need to I can switch the name to 52-Hertz Whale. But at least for right now, this one's 377A Butterchange My Stranger; God have mercy on us all.

-

¹ Meaning "folk etymology;" this is the process by which an unfamiliar or difficult word gets modified into something more familiar or easier to say, generally mangling the original word beyond recognition and sometimes resulting in a misunderstanding of what part of the original word is the base word and what part is a prefix or suffix. Sometimes it's a deliberate mispronunciation for humorous effect (in which case it's probably more proper to call it a pun), but the book gives the impression that it's normally the result of people hearing a new word, especially one from a foreign language, and then breaking it down into words they already know unintentionally, like when English borrowed cucaracha from Spanish and reformed it into two existing English words, cock (rooster) and roach (originally a kind of fish).
"Eggcorns" are not quite the same thing, though I admit to being a little fuzzy on the difference between eggcorns and folk etymologies.
A few examples given by the book: sankfield used in place of cinquefoil; summer-stop for thermostat; brown-kitties for bronchitis; sparrowgrass for asparagus.
My favorite historical example is probably centipede becoming sandy Pete.
² Markov chaining is explained in the post for Anthurium seedling 0696 "Jessica Wild." Possibly not explained well, but I tried.
³ When a STRANGER sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. (English Standard Version)
⁴ ' . . . and do not oppress the widow or the orphan, the STRANGER or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another.' (New American Standard Bible)
⁵ (In some cases, I remind myself what the possible name refers to by putting something in parentheses with it; I neglected to strip out the parenthetical bits before plugging the name options into the Markov chaining program.)
⁶ Example 1, Example 2. Plus Wikipedia.
⁷ Not so much in "Don't touch that! It's nesh!" as in "Oh my god Becky you have to buy it, it's soooo nesh."