A couple of folks in the "general" forum suggested I post this idea here, which was prompted by a discussion of boring, repetitive, and/or puerile animal names.
Some had suggested making it possible to see who last named the animal, with the idea that a lack of anonymity might discourage racial-slur names and other unsavouries.
Whether players can see this info or not, if the "namer" could be coded in somehow, perhaps it would be possible to set up a kind of reward system for really good animal names. If a player sees a funny or clever name, they could have the option of "liking" the name--every player would only be allowed one "like" per animal, to avoid vote-flooding--and the player that named the animal could get some kind of reward, like a small increase in energy, mood, or experience. This could lead to an achievement tree as well--say, one for having 3 people like your animal name, one for 11...etc. This would encourage creativity and cleverness, and raise the bar for animal names.
We also thought about adding a deterrent side to this--offensive names could be "disliked", resulting in a loss of energy or mood, for example--but as the conversation thread was showing, people had different ideas about what was offensive...so we figured it was best to stick with a reward-based system, which seemed more in the spirit of Glitch.
(with thanks to my partner in crime, Apathy Explosion, who has been watching avidly, but has yet to actually play a lick of Glitch)