ROUS from The Princess Bride
A ROUS by any other name is still a ROUS!
People are always asking me how I got my name. They wonder, I think, if my owner is some kind of genius that she was able to come up with the absolute perfect name for me. I’m not willing to grant her that but it is a pretty good name.
There are two parts to my name, we’ll tackle the last part first: Rous.
Rous (pronounced “rose” and I don’t want to hear any guff about it), comes from the book and movie, The Princess Bride. There is a picture of one from the movie at the top of this post. R.O.U.S.’s are one of the three terrors of the Fire Swamp: lightning sand, bursts of flame and ROUSs or Rodents Of Unusual Size.
You can see that I don’t look much like a ROUS from the movie. I don’t have a big mouth full of pointy teeth. I have a small mouth full of giant, razor sharp, rodent teeth. And the ROUSs in the movie are not at all cute so they really don’t even resemble rodents in the most fundamental of ways. Nevertheless, I love that movie and am proud to be associated with it by name.
The other part of my name, Caplin, has a more obscure origin. There are two stories that are both more-or-less true. I will tell them both.
When my owner, Coral (her daughter), Carl (her son-in-law), Philip (her son) and Sheldon (her friend?) were on the long drive up to Nacodgoches, Texas to adopt me, they tried to come up with a name they would all like. One of the things they were afraid of is that they would just end up calling me Capy, short for capybara. To circumvent that, they gave me a name whose natural nickname would be Capy. They claimed that when people asked if Capy was short for capybara they could indignantly say, “No! It is short for Caplin,” and act all superior.
The other story is that a caplin is a type of fish and it makes sense for an aquatic animal such as myself to be named after a fish. In addition, the infallible pope of the Catholic religion has declared capybaras to be fish and so, even though we have all of the characteristics of mammals, it made some sense to name me after a fish.
Hope that helps clear things up. Let me know how you like my name and whether you think my owner is a genius or not.
Both of those stories are only half true. You and I were the only ones in the car. We were on the I-35 frontage road at oltorf. I remember it so clearly. Life before the nightmares…
Why is Sheldon being questioned as a friend? Are you unsure if he’s really your friend?
The fish story (Including the bit about the Catholic Church) was actually my guess for the name. Heheh. So Extra large rodent-fish. <3
The only sad thing about the fish name was that the pope at the time stated Capybara’s to be fish so that they could be eaten of Friday’s and during lent… 🙁
[…] Caplin was a minor celebrity in Texas and online. Not only did he have his own Twitter account and blog — through which he shared his movie musings and love of popsicles — but also boasted a YouTube […]