Names function to distinguish, to categorize, that is, to limit the referential power of persons, places, and things. For example, “home,” is a very dissimilar signifier, than is “234 Dusseldorf Avenue;” “Cave of the Machpelah” is incredibly unlike “outpost” and “clothes dryer” diverges enormously from “Mechanism for Funding our Repairman’s Next Vacation.”

Names not only distinguish specific cases from generalized examples and stand in for universals. In computer science, for instance, singular designations are given to entire sets of messages to save code creators the need to tediously reconstruct many lines of data each time those creators allude to a distinct function.

Sometimes names shield identities, i.e. separate public and private characteristics, as exemplified by writers’ pen names, or by the pseudonyms. Other times, monikers are meant to relay information to the public. For instance, while a kingdom might be well inhabited, only one resident is titularly “His Excellency.”

In the bigger world, we have “Associate Professors in Chemistry” and “sales associates.” In romance, we have “snuggle-umpkins” and “that-fatuous-person-who-wouldn’t-go-on-more-than-two-shidduch-dates.” Our children, depending on our available memory cells and on the rate at which they create chaos in our homestead are: “Hey You,” “Fruit of My Loins,” or “The-Miscreant-Who-Hid-the-Lizard-in the-Dryer.”

Essentially, names help us, as dictated by collective sensibilities, cope with “semantic interoperability,” with getting beyond the confusion that arises when a message’s recipient doesn’t get the gist intended by a message’s source. Beyond bridging incommensurabilities, names can also function as semantic projectiles used to convey sentiment.

by KJ Hannah Greenberg
Jerusalem, Israel
This piece is excerpted from a larger essay formerly posted by The Jerusalem Post in “Old/New World Discourse.”