Felix

I made a new friend. His name is Felix, which means “happy” in Latin. He lives next door, but his Dad works in my house. I like to hang out with Felix when he sits outside my house waiting for his Dad to go back home. I love to stroke his silky soft back until he gets tired of the attention and bites me. His hair is white on his chest and legs, and then striped brown and black on his head, back, and tail. He is quite adorable. Felix's Dad says that Felix probably gobbles up my attention because his family tends to not give him enough time for extended stroking sessions. I don't always have the time either, but sometimes I make the time to get my clothes real hairy from lots of stroking. I am very happy to have Felix as my friend. By the way, in case you didn't figure it out, Felix is a cat.

While I'm talking about Felix, I want to mention more about the name. There is a street nearby called Felix Klein Strasse, which is named after a man by the name of Felix Klein. His name translated to English means “Happy Small”. I find that humorous. “Hi, my name is Happy Small.” What if someone by the name of Felix happened to have the German words Dick or Gross for his last name? Then he would be either “Happy Fat” or “Happy Big”. Now, the question is, would you rather be “Happy Small” or “Happy Big”? When Adam Sandler made the movie “Happy Gilmore”, he totally should have chosen a cool, secret German last name to go with Happy. But, I suppose I should research the meaning of Gilmore to see if that actually does means something secretly cool. If someone in my family were named Felix, then it would be “Felix Koning”, which translates to “Happy King”. If it were someone in Steve's family, then it would be “Felix Kraft”, which translates to “Happy Strong”. Oooh, to have a Felix in Michelle's family would be quite delightful. A “Felix Heider” would translate to “Happy Heathen”. Ah, Michelle you might have won with the better Hawaiian name (Ihi Lani, meaning “Heavenly Splendor”, compared to my Lali, meaning “greasy as pork fat”), but I win in this game. If you were named Felix, what would you want your last name to be?

Since I'm talking about playing with words, I'll continue with another strain of thought. When I was in high school, Trisha Harting and I each had a vacant class period because we were taking foreign language classes at the community college. We would spend the vacant period in our math teacher's room getting extra help, since we were both quite horrible math students and needed all the help we could get. Our teacher's name was Mr. Kraft and he was a very nice person who we enjoyed as a teacher and friend. One day, Trisha and I decided to jokingly write on the chalk board, “Mr. Kraft is fat” in our respective foreign languages. (Mr. Kraft was in fact quite fit, in case you are thinking that we were seriously making fun of him.) Trisha quickly whipped out her sentence in French, but I had trouble with mine. I couldn't in good conscience write my statement on the board, “Mr. Kraft ist dick”, because English speakers, especially high school students, would totally misunderstand the statement. The closest alternative to “dick” seemed to me to be “gross”, which means “big”, but can still be so horribly misconstrued by English speakers. We did happen to have a retired/substitute teacher in our school named “Mrs. Gross”, so I figured that students couldn't misunderstand me too horribly. What this little joke demonstrated to me is how we can have the same words in two similar languages (German and English), but the meanings can be so completely different. Trisha seemed to have it so easy with her French because her words were so completely foreign. But in choosing my words, I really had to be careful!

Afterword: I looked up the meaning of the last name "Gilmore". It has a few meanings of Irish origin. It can be either "servant of the Virgin Mary", "servant of St. Mura", or "son of the spirited lad". This means that "Happy Gilmore" could in fact be "Happy son of the spirited lad". Since it was Happy's father who taught him to the fierce golf swing which the film is centered around, I suppose he was probably a "spirited lad". I don't think that Happy Gilmore would mean "Happy Servant of the Virgin Mary" in the case of this particular film since Adam Sandler is Jewish and all of the characters he plays in films are Jewish. Ah, I love words.