Pokélogan

Pokémon has been in the sync stream lately, which made me think of something I hadn't thought of in ages.

Sometime in the late 1990s, I somehow acquired a Pokémon keychain which looked sort of like a sky-blue Loch Ness monster. I can't remember how I came to be in possession of such a thing; I either found it somewhere or was given it. I didn't know what that sort of Pokémon was properly called, but somewhere along the line it came to be known as Pokélogan. I can't remember how that came about, either. Looking it up now, I find that pokelogan (with a silent e) is a dialect word from New England, meaning "a usually stagnant inlet or marshy place branching off from a stream or lake." I guess I probably ran across the word in Thoreau or some similar writer and then saddled my keychain critter with it because it begins poke- and has aquatic connotations. (I don't know why I'm so vague on all this. I usually have an excellent episodic memory.)

Years later, some more Poké-literate acquaintance informed me of the thing's real name, which was something uninspired and forgettable and just generally vastly inferior to Pokélogan. On February 4, when I posted "One-eyed × purple people eater," in which I mention my general ignorance of all things Pokémon, I thought of Pokélogan and racked my brain trying to remember its "real" name but got nothing.

This morning I browsed /x/ a bit and clicked on a thread with the nondescript title "How many paranormal experiences have you had?" The second reply was this:

I don't think I would even have read the post had it not gotten my attention by mentioning chameleon, a word which has been in the sync stream, early on. (Incidentally, the Chinese implicitly agree with his dinosaur chameleon theory; the final character in 變色龍, "chameleon," corresponds to -saurus and appears at the end of all dinosaur names.) I kept reading and found Lapras as the name of a plesiosaur-like Pokémon. This, surely, was the name I had been trying to remember two days ago, Pokélogan's "true" name! A quick search confirms this:

Laplace as the transliteration of the Japanese caught my eye, since obviously that's not a normal way of transliterating Japanese. Scrolling down, I find that the name "may be a reference to Pierre-Simon Laplace, a mathematician who wrote several books on the mathematical properties of the sea and tides." I somehow didn't know that about Laplace. What I did know is that he was one of the first thinkers to propose, more than a century ahead of its time, the concept of what would later be known as a "black hole."

I think I still have that Pokélogan keychain somewhere. If I find it, I'll add a photo here.

Update: Here it is: