Ch. 6 - What's in a Name?

Chris OConnor · Posted: Fri Dec 28, 2007 1:21 am Post subject: Ch. 6 - What's in a Name?

Ch. 6 - What's in a Name?

Please use this thread for discussing Ch. 6 - What's in a Name?

tlpounds · Posted: Mon Feb 11, 2008 12:49 am Post subject: Not Impressed, but

I have to admit: Chapter Six did not impress me. (I like it even less than chapter two, which was extremely dense and tedious to get through, in my opinion.) It just seemed that the author wasn't making any worthwhile additions to his book with this chapter, other than pointing out "sound symbolism" and the fact that there are phenomena in the world that still goes unnamed ("...a word for unmarried heterosexual partners").

However, the very title, "What's in a name?" got me thinking of the act of naming itself. The power that a coiner has to leave a lasting legacy on mankind –perhaps it is one of the only potentially immortal things a person can do! After all, to think of a word and label something as such can live on long after a person has died –so long as that language remains intact. Thus, to name is power. In contrast, I believe, not to name (or, as the author calls it "unname") is weak, or an act of leaving something to mystery. In order to name something, we must know at least something about it to classify/label it in any way. However, if we cannot know something or something is simply a mystery or a conundrum to us, we just let it go unnamed –not sure on how to categorize it. In doing so, we allow something to have power over us, or leave us wary about it in some way.

The first example that quickly came to mind was Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter series. The only person who calls Voldemort by his name is Harry; everyone else fears him so much that they refer to him as "You-Know-Who" or "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named." Because Harry calls him by his name, it's as if he takes Voldemort down a notch from this mysteriously powerful Dark Lord that no one can defeat, to a someone (just another wizard) with a name (an actual name that was given to him by a mother and father just like the rest of us) who can be fought (not mysteriously omnipotent).

From these thoughts, my mind began to wonder to things that we don't name (like the word for unmarried heterosexual partners) to things that have a name but we just don't (or shouldn't) say (e.g. four-letter words...). But, that apparently a Chapter Seven discussion, so I’ll stop here for now until next week…

Loricat · Graduate Student Joined: 03 Mar 2005 Posts: 446 Gender:

Naming is powerful, and it's a great topic...whether the chapter is comprehensible or not!!

Suzette Haden Elgin, SF writer, Linguist, created a language that "is by women, for women and expresses the perceptions of women" called Laadan (http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/Laadan.html) for a series of books.

One of the things that was important in this language was what she called 'encodings' -- previously un-expressed concepts...like unmarried homosexual partners. (Actually, there is no satisfactory word for unmarried life partners of any orientation...)

Here's a list of things we never knew had names:
http://www.canongate.net/Lists/Words/33NamesOfThingsYouNeverKne

The urban dictionary project is also doing this kind of work...

JulianTheApostate · Sophomore Joined: 23 Jul 2005 Posts: 286 Gender:

Unlike tlpounds, I enjoyed chapter 6. I was up in the middle of the night, and I read the entire chapter without falling asleep. In contrast to Chapter 2, the broader concepts involved with naming and Pinker's specific examples were each interesting. It helped that this chapter was easier to read than earlier chapters, because the concepts were less abstract and I've seen other philosophical discussions about what words mean.

For example, there have been arguments going back to Plato about whether a what word like "cat" means. There a lots of individual creatures, each of which can be considered a "cat". Does that categorization have a meaning outside the human mind? The nuanced perspective of Kripke and Putnam, which Pinker describes, seemed more appealing that the Platonic or Empirical extremes.

The section Where do new words come from? was a neat topic. I've noticed various new words emerging during my lifetime, and Pinker had some solid insights about which words successfully entered the lexicon. Phonesthesia, which occur when "families of words share a teeny snatch of sound and a teeny shred of meaning", like nose-oriented words starting with "sn", was something I was vaguely aware of but hadn't read about before.

And the discussion of person's names was more satisfying than the similar chapter in Freakonomics. The following phrase caught my eye, in part because I have a nephew named Max.

Loricat · Graduate Student Joined: 03 Mar 2005 Posts: 446 Gender:

I too really enjoyed this chapter... I remember a 4th year phonetics class where we discussed phonesthesia for most of a week.

Two ideas really struck me in this chapter -- the discussion of how only some neologisms catch on, and the discussion on trends. [Neologisms that drive me crazy: 'bling' '24/7' and the internet meaning of a 'meme' (where it means any silly quiz that people pass around to each other on blogs). ]

I've been noticing that the topic of trends is becoming more and more trendy...on a real meta-level, where now instead of the discussion of what the trends are, instead we're reading books that analyze what creates trends. And it's showing up in fiction too: William Gibson's Pattern Recognition and Connie Willis' Bellwether are two that stand out.


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