How to Name Your French Pet

This evening during dinner, Edith and I were talking about typical pet names in France and the U.S.  They tend to name their pets after common nouns.  In case you don't know, in France, every object has a gender. Calculators are feminine, the world is masculine.  Every inanimate object is male or female, and no, I don't know how they decide which words get which gender, so memorizing it is a huge pain in the ass.  You flat out just have to remember whether every noun in the French language is arbitrarily male or female, or the French will laugh at your ineptitude.

But anyway, that detail is actually relevant.  I was asking if Edith's moody cat, Chocolate, was a boy or a girl, and she laughed as if it was a really silly question and said, "But Lindsey, it's a boy name!"  I shrugged like, "How the hell would I know that?"  It turns out that when it comes to naming your pets, words that are masculine are assigned to male pets, and words that are feminine are assigned to female pets.  It makes sense, but it was something that had never even crossed my mind, just because I'm not used to thinking about inanimate objects that way.

So basically, if you were hoping to name your new puppy "Tampon," it had better be a boy.  I wasn't messing around when I said noun gendering is arbitrary.