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A Little Monitor Lizard Called Liora
An iceberg story about how I chose my baby lizard’s name.
When I arranged to get a baby lizard, I initially thought I was getting a boy. I was going to name him Seamus.
I hadn’t picked him out from the babies that were available. I transacted with the breeder through text message and the pictures and video he sent were of a very sweet and social baby monitor, one of two boys that was available. He was very curious about his surroundings and ready to develop confidence.
Given that Kimberley Rock Monitors hail from Australia, I was urged to pick an Australian name. One of my Twitter mutuals even sent me a list of popular baby names in Oz, proclaiming he looked like an Archie or Dale. With many Australians coming from Irish stock, and my recent travels to the Emerald Isle that surprisingly revealed a thriving reptile hobby, I was gravitating towards an Irish name.
“S” names were standing out to me for some reason along with “L”. Which may have been a strangely subconscious thing: both my late biological mother and living stepmother have L initials and my father has S. My middle name even sounds phonetically close to the name I initially picked: Shaina.
Eastern European Jewish traditions often use necronyms for naming children and this dates back…
