You should be able to rename the items, even if memnoch says otherwise. go to
www.teambg.net (or .com or .org or whatever happens to work at the moment) and grab the tools for the job.
and i saw waaaaaaay back (before the forum software was upgraded and when the search function still worked) a thread describing a way to give anyone a familiar (and not just the standard ones, the guy had a red-dragon). i woudnt like to try and find it now though..
as for the lithping text idea, it would be dead easy (in theory) to change _all_ the text, just open the appropriate files with the appropriate tools (teambg again) and do a search-replace switching th for s. but to do only the text your char says youd have to do it all manualy. good luck...