Coucou everyone, I’m Ellie, a 2-year-old cockapoo and Official Co-Worker of MFL Mentoring’s Project Director, Lucy Jenkins.

She is more fondly known to me as ‘Servant’ but I’m not really sure that she likes that; she’ll probably be cross that I shared that with you, but never mind. I have more important things to share with you which are my big dreams of becoming the social media star of MFL Mentoring because sometimes people forget that we dogs speak languages too and I need to tell everyone about it!

But a little about me first. My pronouns are she/her and I’m a medium sized dog with white-ish (depending on how muddy the walk was) curly hair. I’m a teenager now so I like to sleep a lot. My family sometimes call me lazy which I think is unfair. Haven’t they read the research on how teenagers need extra sleep?!

I’m going to leave a reference to this fascinating research at the end of my blog for any doubters! My favourite things to do other than snooze, are to go to the beach, play with my tennis ball and to drink sea water from the rock pools – I know this is not super healthy for me, but it’s just so tasty. I also really love food – a lot!

So to get started, I actually wanted to tell you about the many names that my humans call me – Ellie Wellie, Eleanor Wellington, the Right Honourable Dame Eleanor Wellington, Ellie Wellie Boots and Evil Ellie. I’m not sure why they think it’s appropriate to call me so many different names, but they keep on doing it, and it actually got me thinking….

When they are happy with me, they call me Ellie Wellie Boots, but when they are cross, they call me Evil Ellie. They think I don’t understand the difference, but I know because they say ‘Evil Ellie’ with cross voices and ‘Ellie Wellie Boots’ with smiles and cuteness. It occurred to me that they use lots of different words (and these are just the English ones) to refer to me – but how does it work to have so many names when I am just one dog!?

Have you ever thought about the many different names you call your pets? Or maybe your friends? Or siblings? Or Aunt or cousins? Have you ever thought about why you do that, or what it suggests about your feelings towards something or someone when you use those words?

Take the word for dog as an example: dog, pup, puppy, pooch, doggo, hound, scruff bag, mutt, fleabag… one ‘thing’and yet, so many words. Language is key. What image comes to your brain when I say ‘pooch’? Is it different from ‘hound’? Why?

We’ll leave it there for now but I want you think about it and let me know the many names you call your pet or people over on Twitter/Instagram – join me there!

Until next time….

Ellie Wellie Boots