Naming New Paltzers

Cat the Cheese, Ben the Plow, Steve the Fire. These are a few of our favorite names around New Paltz.

When we first moved to the Noop, we knew that we'd be meeting a lot of new people in all areas of our lives. We decided to borrow from one of our favorite movies in order to simplify things. In an early Hugh Grant movie called "The Englishman Who Went up a Hill and Came down a Mountain," some Welsh townsfolk refer to each other as [Name] the [Job]. We decided to adopt that strategy as well. It seems to make the most sense to use this technique under two circumstances:

1. The person has a common name, so we're trying to avoid confusion, or
2. The person doesn't come up in conversation too often, so we're reminding each other about the person in a shorthand way.

[Name] the [Job] has two benefits. It conveys a sentence-worth of information in just three words, and it's fun.

Our favorite names so far:

Cat the Cheese: the lovely young woman who owns the cheese shop in Water Street Market
Dave the Toy: owns Enchanted Toys.
Ben the Plow: the man who saves us from being completely snowed in,
Joe the Plow: the man who saved us when Ben the Plow didn't make it one time last year,
Joe the Phone: a fireman who happens to work for Verizon,
Steve the Fire: another fireman (who happens to be a musician),
Steve the Mail: our usual mailman,