Posts Tagged ‘names’
“A good name is rather to be chosen than riches”*
From Gregory Ross and his lovely blog Futility Closet…
Unusual names of racehorses, collected by Paul Dickson in What’s in a Name?, 1996:
- Bates Motel
- Disco Inferno
- Up Your Assets
- Race Horse
- Crashing Bore
- English Muffin
- Leo Pity Me
- Cold Shower
- T.V. Doubletalk
- Ranikaboo
- Holy Cats
- Hadn’t Orter
- Strong Strong
- Honeybunny Boo
After the Jockey Club rejected several names for one filly in the 1960s, the exasperated owner wrote “You Name It” on the application form. “We did,” said registrar Alfred Garcia. “We approved the name You Name It, and I think she turned out to be a winner, too.”
This race, run at Monmouth Park in 2010, seems to take on a deeper significance near the end:
(Thorouhbred racing remains a controversial endeavor. Whenever a racing accident severely injures a well-known horse, such as the major leg fractures that led to the euthanization of 2006 Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro, or 2008 Kentucky Derby runner-up Eight Belles, animal rights groups have denounced the Thoroughbred racing industry. On the other hand, advocates of racing argue that without horse racing, far less funding and incentives would be available for medical and biomechanical research on horses. They note that though horse racing is hazardous, veterinary science has advanced. Previously hopeless cases can now be treated, and earlier detection through advanced imaging techniques like scintigraphy can keep at-risk horses off the track. Still, the argument continues.
More fundamentally, there is a class divide at the root of the sport: racehorse owners are largely the wealthy; “railbirds”– those who bet on the sport– largely working class.)
* Proverbs 22:1 (usually attributed to Solomon)
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As noodle on nomenclature, we might recall tah it was on this date in 1896 that Paulding Farnham of Tiffany & Co. begona work on a commission to create a silver cup to be awarded to the winner of the Belmont Stakes (the third leg of the Triple Crown).
It was commissioned by August Belmont Jr., in memory of his late father August Belmont, the namesake of the Belmont Stakes. Farnham used 350 ounces of sterling silver to craft a 27-inch high, 30-pound acorn-shaped bowl supported by a pedestal composed of three Thoroughbred horse statues representing the foundation stallions Eclipse, Matchem, and Herod. The bowl was 15 inches across and 14 inches at the base and had a prominent acorn and oak motif symbolizing the development of modern racing Thoroughbreds from those three foundation sires. The lid was crowned with a statue of the elder Belmont’s racehorse Fenian who secured Belmont’s first win in the Belmont Stakes in 1869.
The cup cost $1,000 to create and augmented the $4,000 in prize money given to the race winner. In the event, August Belmont, Jr. himself won the Cup when his horse Hastings won the race.
The burden of parting with such a creation– more and more costly over the years was such that, from 1908, winners are presented the permanent trophy for ceremonial purposes only, the winning owner of the Belmont Stakes receives a smaller replica of the trophy to keep. The winning trainer and jockey are also presented with (even smaller) replicas, while the winning groom is given a statuette to commemorate the victory.
“What’s in a name?”*…
… maybe, Roger’s Bacon suggests, more than we typically think…
An aptronym is when a person has a name that is uniquely suited to its owner. Some examples:
- Usain Bolt, the fastest human ever
- Mark De Man, Belgian football defender
- William Headline, Washington Bureau Chief for CNN
- Marijuana Pepsi Vandyck, American education professional with a dissertation on uncommon African-American names in the classroom
- William Wordsworth, poet
- Philander Rodman, father of basketball player Dennis Rodman, who fathered 26 children by 16 mothers
- Sue Yoo, attorney
And of course there are also inaptronyms:
- Rob Banks, a British police officer
- Don Black, white supremacist
- Robin Mahfood, President and CEO of Food for the Poor
- I.C. Notting, an ophthalmologist at Leiden University
Maybe this is all coincidence, or maybe it’s nominative determinism, the hypothesis that people tend to gravitate towards areas of work that fit their names (an idea captured in the ancient Roman proverb “nomen est omen” meaning “the name is the sign”). Psychologist Lawrence Casler proposed three possible explanations for nominative determinism: one’s self-image and self-expectation being internally influenced by one’s name; the name acting as a social stimulus, creating expectations in others that are then communicated to the individual; and genetics—attributes suited to a particular career being passed down the generations alongside the appropriate occupational surname.
But does nominative determinism actually exist—are people with occupation-related names over-represented in those occupations?…
[RB considers the evidence… then ponders a more fundamental issue: “the virtually universal practice of assigning a permanent name at birth”…]
… When naming conventions are created by governments and for governments, they favor legibility and as a consequence, individuality and stability of identity. In my brief heretical statement, I suggested that our modern naming conventions have caused a species-wide shift towards a more narcissistic and egotistical mode of being. Maybe this goes too far (or not far enough…), but the more general idea is that personal nomenclature is never value neutral and never without cultural and psychological ramifications. In other words, we shouldn’t be surprised that our culture has become sterile, stagnant, and individualistic to a fault when those values are embedded in the way we name ourselves.
The global hegemony of governmentally-developed naming systems has crippled our imagination by removing alternative models of nomenclature…
[He considers alternatives with examples from New Guinean and Native American cultures…]
… Naming systems are reflections of a culture’s values, but, as I’ve argued, it’s a two-way street—the way we name ourselves reinforces these values and frames how we think about ourselves and the world around us. When legibility, individuality, and stability of identity are the master values of our personal nomenclature, of course we will look for legible, de-personalized solutions (e.g. technology, laws, governmental programs) to society’s ills (environmental degradation, social isolation and loss of community, mental health and addiction, to name just a few). These solutions are only partial and always will be because they don’t get to the root of the problem: ourselves—who we are as people, what we value, and how we think. There is no shortcut to profound personal change, but a first step in the right direction might make all the difference—if we want to be the kind of people who value community and the natural world and who believe that people can grow and then perhaps we should name ourselves in a way that inspires us to be those kind of people…
A provocative challenge to the way we name ourselves: “Nomen est Omen,” from @RogersBacon1.
* Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
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As we dig into denotation, we might note that today is a red-letter day for another of the descriptors of our idenitities, one with increasing importance (at least unless we use trustworthy password managers or come up with a better system): it’s Change Your Password Day.
“Take a good book to bed with you—books do not snore”*…
From Greg Ross, a helpful vocabulary lesson for those of us who would talk about people’s relationships with books…
rarissima
n. extremely rare books, manuscripts, or printsIn The Book Hunter (1863), John Hill Burton identifies five types of “persons who meddle with books”:
- “A bibliognoste, from the Greek, is one knowing in title-pages and colophons, and in editions; the place and year when printed; the presses whence issued; and all the minutiae of a book.”
- “A bibliographe is a describer of books and other literary arrangements.”
- “A bibliomane is an indiscriminate accumulator, who blunders faster than he buys, cock-brained and purse-heavy.”
- “A bibliophile, the lover of books, is the only one in the class who appears to read them for his own pleasure.”
- “A bibliotaphe buries his books, by keeping them under lock, or framing them in glass cases.”
These groups seem to have been proposed by French librarian Jean Joseph Rive. Bibliographer Gabriel Peignot added four more:
- bibliolyte, a destroyer of books
- bibliologue, one who discourses about books
- bibliotacte, a classifier of books
- bibliopée, “‘l’art d’écrire ou de composer des livres,’ or, as the unlearned would say, the function of an author.”…
For the bibliophiles among us: “In a Word,” from Futility Closet.
(Image above: source)
* Thea Dorn
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As we love our labels, we might send eerie birthday greetings to Howard Phillips Lovecraft; he was born on this date in 1890. The creator of the Cthulhu Mythos, he was a pioneer of weird, science, fantasy, and horror fiction. H.P. Lovecraft was almost unknown in his lifetime, but has become one of the most influential writers of the Twentieth Century– Jorge Luis Borges, Joyce Carol Oates, and Stephen King, among many other writers, comic artists, and filmmakers, have all proclaimed their indebtedness.
“The art of giving the same name to different things”*…
If we hear someone mention “Philadelphia,” how are we to know to which city of that name they refer? The Pudding has a handy, data-driven (though, as they confess, still a bit subjective) guide that covers every duplicated place name in the U.S.: “We calculated what place someone is most likely referring to, depending on where they are”…
Use their interactive tool yourself: “A Map of Places in the US with the Same Name,” from @puddingviz.
* Henri Poincare (on mathematics)
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As we disambiguate, we might recall that it was on this date in 1718 that a city with no competition for its name (per The Pudding) was born: New Orleans was founded by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, on behalf of the French Mississippi Company. Le Moyne named it for Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, the regent of the Kingdom of France at the time (and by extension for the French city of Orléans, the seat of Philippe’s title).
In fact, the land was already occupied by the Chitimacha, who had been in the the Mississippi River Delta area for thousands of years. Prior to European expeditions to North America, they had numbered roughly 20,000. Although the Chitimacha had virtually no direct contact with Europeans for two more centuries, they suffered Eurasian infectious diseases (main among them: measles, smallpox, and typhoid fever) contracted from other natives who had traded with them. Like other Native Americans, the Chitimacha had no immunity to these new diseases and suffered high fatalities in epidemics. By 1700, when the French began to colonize the Mississippi River Valley, the number of Chitimacha had been dramatically reduced– to about 700 people.
“Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love”*…
Or is it? The web– and the world– are awash in talk of the Mimetic Theory of Desire (or Rivalry, as its creator, René Girard, would also have it). Stanford professor (and Philosophy Talk co-host) Joshua Landy weights in with a heavy word of caution…
Here are two readings of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Which do you think we should be teaching in our schools and universities?
Reading 1. Hamlet is unhappy because he, like all of us, has no desires of his own, and therefore has no being, properly speaking. The best he can do is to find another person to emulate, since that’s the only way anyone ever develops the motivation to do anything. Shakespeare’s genius is to show us this life-changing truth.
Reading 2. Hamlet is unhappy because he, like all of us, is full of body thetans, harmful residue of the aliens brought to Earth by Xenu seventy-five million years ago and disintegrated using nuclear bombs inside volcanoes. Since it is still some time until the practice of auditing comes into being, Hamlet has no chance of becoming “clear”; it is no wonder that he displays such melancholy and aimlessness. Shakespeare’s genius is to show us this life-changing truth.
Whatever you make of the first, I’m rather hoping that you feel at least a bit uncomfortable with the second. If so, I have a follow-up question for you: what exactly is wrong with it? Why not rewrite the textbooks so as to make it our standard understanding of Shakespeare’s play? Surely you can’t fault the logic behind it: if humans have indeed been full of body thetans since they came into existence, and Hamlet is a representation of a human being, Hamlet must be full of body thetans. What is more, if everyone is still full of body thetans, then Shakespeare is doing his contemporaries a huge favor by telling them, and the new textbooks will be doing us a huge favor by telling the world. Your worry, presumably, is that this whole body thetan business is just not true. It’s an outlandish hypothesis, with nothing whatsoever to support it. And since, as Carl Sagan once said, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” we would do better to leave it alone.
I think you see where I’m going with this. The fact is, of course, that the first reading is just as outlandish as the second. As I’m about to show (not that it should really need showing), human beings do have desires of their own. That doesn’t mean that all our desires are genuine; it’s always possible to be suckered into buying a new pair of boots, regardless of the fact that they are uglier and shoddier than our old ones, just because they are fashionable. What it means is that some of our desires are genuine. And having some genuine desires, and being able to act on them, is sufficient for the achievement of authenticity. For all we care, Hamlet’s inky cloak could be made by Calvin Klein, his feathered hat by Diane von Furstenberg; the point is that he also has motivations (to know things, to be autonomous, to expose guilt, to have his story told accurately) that come from within, and that those are the ones that count.
To my knowledge, no one in the academy actually reads Hamlet (or anything else) the second way. But plenty read works of literature the first way. René Girard, the founder of the approach, was rewarded for doing so with membership in the Académie française, France’s elite intellectual association. People loved his system so much that they established a Colloquium on Violence and Religion, hosted by the University of Innsbruck, complete with a journal under the ironically apt name Contagion. More recently, Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, loved it so much that he sank millions of dollars into Imitatio, an institute for the dissemination of Girardian thought. And to this day, you’ll find casual references to the idea everywhere, from people who seem to think it’s a truth, one established by René Girard. (Here’s a recent instance from the New York Times opinion pages: “as we have learned from René Girard, this is precisely how desires are born: I desire something by way of imitation, because someone else already has it.”) All of which leads to an inevitable question: what’s the difference between Girardianism and Scientology? Why has the former been more successful in the academy? Why is the madness of theory so, well, contagious?…
Are we really dependent on others for our desires? Does that mechanism inevitably lead to rivalry, scapegoating, and division? @profjoshlandy suggests not: “Deceit, Desire, and the Literature Professor: Why Girardians Exist,” in @StanfordArcade. Via @UriBram in @TheBrowser. Eminently worth reading in full.
* Friedrich Nietzsche (an inspiration to Girard)
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As we tease apart theorizing, we might spare a thought for William Whewell; he died on this date in 1866. A scientist, Anglican priest, philosopher, theologian, and historian of science, he was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.
At a time when specialization was increasing, Whewell was renown for the breadth of his work: he published the disciplines of mechanics, physics, geology, astronomy, and economics, while also finding the time to compose poetry, author a Bridgewater Treatise, translate the works of Goethe, and write sermons and theological tracts. In mathematics, Whewell introduced what is now called the Whewell equation, defining the shape of a curve without reference to an arbitrarily chosen coordinate system. He founded mathematical crystallography and developed a revision of Friedrich Mohs’s classification of minerals. And he organized thousands of volunteers internationally to study ocean tides, in what is now considered one of the first citizen science projects.
But some argue that Whewell’s greatest gift to science was his wordsmithing: He created the words scientist and physicist by analogy with the word artist; they soon replaced the older term natural philosopher. He also named linguistics, consilience, catastrophism, uniformitarianism, and astigmatism.
Other useful words were coined to help his friends: biometry for John Lubbock; Eocine, Miocene and Pliocene for Charles Lyell; and for Michael Faraday, electrode, anode, cathode, diamagnetic, paramagnetic, and ion (whence the sundry other particle names ending -ion).
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