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Washington, United States
loves: you win if you guessed "pets" and "museums". Also books, art history, travel, British punk, Korean kimchi, bindis, martinis, and other things TBD. I will always make it very clear if a post is sponsored in any way. Drop me a line at thepetmuseum AT gmail.com !

Sunday, October 07, 2007

kitty town

(Still not doing too well, in all honesty. I knew when the time came for Zozo to go that it was going to hurt, but I'm amazed at how much. I wish I could make it stop.)

I know a place, for I used to live near there, that actually was named after cats. Felida's the name, and it's a lovely open farm and orchard area about 7 miles northwest of downtown Vancouver, WA. (Unless by now they have bulldozed all the orchards and thrown in some craptastic housing developments named stuff like "Orchard Hill".)

"Felida" is a corruption of the Latin term "Felidae" for the genus cat - for example, our fine Elizabeth is a Felis catus, or if you want to break it all the way down in taxonomy:

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Carnivora
Family: Felidae
Genus: Felis
Species: silvestris
Subspecies: catus

The story goes, according to the book "Washington Place Names,"
that when the post office was established in 1890 the name Powley was submitted
in honor of a pioneer settler. The postal department countered with the name
Polly. Offended at having their community named for a parrot, the
townspeople resisted. C.C. Lewis suggested the post office be named Thomas,
after his cat. This irritated the citizens even more. Lewis then suggested the
Latin word felidae, for the genus cat, and this name had enough class to be
accepted.
Ha, I love it. You pronounce it FEE ly DA.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Alas the latter has happened, although they have built up large two and five acre plots around there. It's quite desirable. I'd say this happened oh perhaps 10 years ago now or more that they started building!

The Lee County Clowder said...

the Food Source here.

If you ever find a way to ease the pain, let us - all of us - know about it. You never realize how throughly a little cat can intertwine herself into your life until she is suddenly yanked out of it.

Time helps, a little. Eventually you'll start remembering the good times more than the pain.