H2NaD

James Thurber's informal essay entitled "How to Name a Dog" is the author's attempt to address the hundreds of requests he had received asking for help with naming a dog.

Somehow, people interpreted his cartoon drawings of a dog to mean that he was an expert on dog names, but he often failed to answer such letters because they had a way of disappearing behind his rolltop desk.

The essay is characterized by humorous anecdotes along with a conversational style. Furthermore, Thurber goes off on long digressions...in many ways, he is reminiscent of Walter Mitty, the star of one of Thurber's most famous short stories.

Although Thurber mentions over 70 names for dogs in the course of his essay, he regards most of them with distaste, and he dislikes the longest and most ridonkulous of them. For his own dogs, it seems, Thurber chooses short, simple names.

Thurber goes on to discuss three major groups of dog names: Cryptic, Coy, and Cynical. The cryptic, he says, are designed to make you wonder why the dog's name is as it is, and the coy, as the largest group of dog names, are simply intended to make you regard the cuteness of the name. Cynical names, like Tojo, Mussolini, and Adolf, reflect the pessimistic, negative side of dog owners in World War II-era America.

To justify the name of the essay, Thurber suggests one dog's name for all of his readers, and that name is Stong. You could say that Thurber got the last laugh because now thousands of dog owners have probably named their dogs Stong on Thurber's advice, and that is hilarious revenge because Phil Stong, a writer, named his own dog Thurber.