Update: hippo horthorgraphy

According to she with whom I look to be sharing a room for most of January, there are a couple of possible spellings of the word “haloof”—suggesting that is probably a dialectal word that was at some point transcribed into Arabic and whose spelling can vary according to local pronunciation:

ﺣﻠﻮﻒ
equals Haloof with strong h, usually transliterated with a dot underneath
ﮬﻠﻮﻑ
equals Haloof with a weaker h

Apparently, the word originally means “wild boar,” which seems a much better hyp(p)othesis to me than a type of horse, though still far removed from my cetacean connections. The classical Arabic dictionary I consulted gives “ﻓﺮﺲ ﺍﻟﻨﺤﺮ”—“fars al-nahur” or “water horse”—simply transcribing the etymology of those untrustworthy latinate Greeks Timothy Danaos and Dona Ferentes.

The human is a big fan of languages written from right to left as he’s left-handed, and is in fact so clumsy with his right that he had trouble eating his tajine without a fork.

I always suspected there was something sinister about him.