Where’d you get your band name?

I hear this question a lot.  Before that question, people usually take a few minutes to stumble through the pronunciation of our band name.  Ailura.  eye-LURH-a.  I wish there was a word it rhymed with, then I could say, “You know, it rhymes with orange.”  (I’ll probably end up naming my next band Zorrange, so then I can say, “Yeah, it rhymes with orange!”  Then the English language would finally have a rhyming word with orange.  Except…doesn’t doorhinge already rhyme?)

If Shakespeare can make up words, then I guess I can too.  It’s the same way Bert McCracken from The Used made up the word ‘squoze’ in All That I’ve Got.  It’s art- give them creative freedom.  Ailura is a made up word.  I enjoy words, especially etymology, the study of words, their origin, and how their meaning has developed.  This isn’t the first word I’ve made up.  I invented candessence in 2008 when I was writing a story, which means a light mist.  I found out later the name is used by a beauty company, and I think I saw a band named candessence somewhere.  My best friend and I made up the word bungle, which is candy mixed into ice cream.  For example, “Quick Kayla, put back that French Vanilla, it doesn’t have enough bungles in it!  Buy the Moose Tracks Ice Cream because it’s full of bungles.”  My vocab wasn’t that great at the time, and I found out later bungle is actually a word, and it means exactly like how it sounds.  To bungle is to mess up, or to botch something. 

The word Ailura come from the ancient Greek prefix, Ailuro, which means belonging to, or having the characteristics of the feline family.  So ailuromania is actually the proper diagnoses for the crazy cat lady.  An ailuropod is an animal that has feet like a cat.

The first time we met, I invited Kayla and Todd over to my house for dinner.  I really wanted to impress her because I knew she could sing like a siren, so I made sure everything was perfect.  As Murphy’s Law would have it, that evening was a mess.  Kayla started getting really sick halfway through dinner and I kept asking her what was wrong.  She was coughing, sneezing, wheezing and pretty much trying to hide the fact that she was suffocating.  Eventually her and Todd went home, and I was left to wonder what the hell happened?

Come to find out a week later that she’s deathly allergic to cats.  Well good for me, because I have not one long haired ailuropod, not two, but three long haired Main coons- and to make matters worse, they’re all indoor cats.  After feeling like an idiot, I thought it would be funny to name our band cat-phobia, but that sounded lame and boring to me, so I started researching other ways to say cat-phobia, and I found ailurophobia.  I thought that was pretty good, so I wrote it down and started to play with it.

At first we were going to name our band Ailurophobia, but we changed it a few months later because it has a negative connotation to it that we didn’t like very much.  We dropped the phobia, and somewhere along the line changed that ‘o’ to an ‘a’ and decided on the name Ailura.  Kayla suggested Fate, because it really was fate that brought us together.  Maybe cats really are wiser than they let on.  They played match maker for Kayla and I and look what happened to us! 

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Till next time,

Lindy D