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Muning

As is the case with many of these posts, I don't really remember what started the conversation. I remember the punchline and I remember the laughs along the way, but I cannot pinpoint the exact details that led to that turn in conversation. Still, bear with me, because the punchline is worth it.

So, at some point, the Mild Wife and I were commenting that in many Filipino households that have a cat, there are decent odds that the cat is named "Muning." Obviously this rule is not without exceptions, but let's just say that the Mild Wife has seen a lot of "Muning's." As best as I can tell, it's sort of a term of endearment that means "cat," but it frequently becomes the cat's actual name. I suppose the closest translation I can think of would be something like "kitty" in English, where some people just name up naming their cat "Kitty."

In fact, the Mild Wife has even shown me social media posts bemoaning the fact that some elders refuse to call a cat anything but Muning. In one specific example, someone had named their cat something decidedly unique, something like "Tyrannosaurus Rex." Despite multiple corrections, that person's parents and grandparents always referred to said cat as "Muning." There were also a lot of people commenting with some version of, "me too!" so I suspect this was not a unique phenomenon.

With that little bit of trivia out of the way, that led to the setup for this blog post: what happens if you have two cats? If you've named Cat #1 "Muning," what do you call the second one? I mean, for practical purposes, you probably don't want to call Cat #2 "Muning," as well ... do you?

Well, social media started this thought experiment to a degree, so we figured it could help solve this dilemma, as well. A quick poll later, we were giggling as we waited for the responses to roll in. As it turns out, the three top answers seemed to be:

  • Muning-ning
    Yup, you basically just add a diminutive-type ending in order to distinguish them. That, of course, prompted the question of what you would call a third cat. We don't have a good answer for that, but there was a LOT of chuckling as this follow-up question was posed.
  • Kuting
    This one seems to be a mashup of "kitten" and "muning" giving you the resulting name.
  • Clouding (pronouncing "klud-ing")
    I'm honestly not sure I understand this one, but it popped up as an answer. In the interest of being transparent, though, I will mention it here.
So, there you have it: a semi-scientific explanation for what to name a second cat in a Filipino household. I'm not going to lie, whenever all this pandemic stuff is over, I am going to be quite excited if we visit one such household. I will be sure to report back should that happen.

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