About "Spook" - Story Time!

I've been getting some great ideas for a name for Black Dog. LabRat recently suggested "Spook."

Well...now I gotta tell you a story. Two, in fact,

First one, made very short: when I was a kid, my Dad had a yellow lab crossbreed named Spook as a hunting dog. Good dog. One day, he was gone. Swiped. I think my Dad is still bummed out about the loss of Spook.

OK. Story #2. We're going back to 1997, and Abby is a young Marine in the Basic Journalist Course out at Ft. Meade. It's an all-services course, and PFC Abby's primary instuctor is SFC Reed, a black Army NCO. He's very smart.

We're getting toward the end of the class and we're writing "features." These are different from "news," "sports," or "commentary." They're human interest. I opted to do one of mine on the museum the National Security Agency had recently opened at Ft. Meade (yeah - just for a minute, imagine the DoD training all its photojournalists on the same base as the NSA - where you can't take pictures of anything - that was an adventure).

Anyway, I went out and I did the story. The NSA museum is highly cool, by the way. You should go see it if you ever have the opportunity. They have pieces of the U2 that Francis Gary Powers was shot down in.

I wrote the story and handed it it. Of course, being "journalist" trainees, we had to write a headline. I used something along the lines of, "Terrorists, Spies and Spooks - Oh My!"

Yes - I know. Very gay. But that's why God made editors.

The day after we handed our features in, SFC Reed called me aside.

"[Abby], that was a great feature," he said. "But the headline's no good."

I was confused. Disoriented. "Why not, sergeant first class?" (The Marines always used the full rank and it drove the Army instructors nuts)

"Do you know what 'spook' means?"

"Yeah. A spy. Or a ghost."

SFC Reed sighed. The poor man. "Or nigger. It's a term a lot like 'nigger' in the south."

I was mortified. I did not know this. We didn't have any black people where I came from, and I just had no idea. It was embarassing. He didn't mark me down, and I never used 'spook' again.

So...I dunno about that for a dog name. I'd be all about it, but I don't want to be rude. Rude is bad. Since I discovered that people have alternate meanings for the word "coon," I've been very careful to not refer to "shooting coons in the barn when I was a kid," and I don't think I should backslide on this one.

I dunno. It's a shame the term has racist connotations, because I like it.