Dick & Jane Redux

One of my friends is a college professor--of philosophy. She has a charming little daughter who, the last time I saw her, struck me as possibly the most precocious child I have ever seen. The mother is terribly intellectual, as philosophy professors no doubt should be. The child is simply delightful, as children most always are. The mother's name is Susan. She named her daughter Thalia. Thalia, for the unlettered among you, is the Greek muse of comedy. Susan is, well, just a plain old down-home name. Sort of like Dick and Jane.

To tell you the truth, I feel sorry for Thalia. Imagine having to go through school with a moniker like Thalia. Imagine the teasing she will have to endure so her parents can have the satisfaction of anointing their child with a suitably arcane name. But then maybe Thalia will rise above all that and somehow turn it to her advantage. Like, I'm named after a Greek goddess, who are you named after? From what I have seen of her, I'm sure Thalia will do just fine.

Another of my friends, Sherry Walker, has some friends of her own; some of whom are a little odd. (I like to think of her friends as composed of two non-intersecting sets: we salts of the earth, and those others.) Her friend decided, as an expression of feminist rebellion, to have her surname legally changed because, after all, it was her fathers name and that means it was a male-imposed tyranny for which she would not stand. Of course she couldn't adopt her mothers surname either because that name in turn was tainted since it was really her grandfathers name. What a dilemma. She ended up adopting her middle name Michelle as her new surname. What could be safer and more properly antiseptic? In an act of linguistic immaculate conception she is now descended only from herself.

All of which does raise an interesting question. Just why do we name ourselves what we do? It doesn't always seem as innocent as we might think. If college professors name their kids for figures from Greek mythology, what about the rest of us?

I remember a client of mine when I was a welfare worker telling me how she came to name her new-born daughter. She was watching TV in the hospital and was deeply moved by a couple of car commercials. So it seemed only fitting that she name her daughter Toyota Chevette.

Then there was my friend from high-school who, at the height of the sixties, named his newborn son Sky Blue. But then the sixties were known for that sort of thing.

More recently, a coworker of my wife's named her two cute (black) daughters Ebony and Ivory (after the Paul McCartney/Stevie Wonder song). I suppose they wont have any trouble at school, unless they hang out together--teasable only in pairs as it were.

My friend and former boss, Berkeley graduate, New York native, married to an African from Ghana, with three California-hip kids, apparently wanted to acknowledge his Italian heritage. So he named his first son, now a New-Wave rock musician (do we still say New Wave?), Giovonni. Magnificent old-world name, without question. But can you imagine a teenager in 1980s California named Giovonni? He goes by Vonni. Which is the best he can do under the circumstances.

A recent nephew, son to my Mormon brother, was christened Jacob Amon. Jacob and Amon are figures from the Old Testament. They have some special significance for Mormons, although I cant remember what that significance might be because its been awhile since I followed such things with any keen interest. But my brother and his wife wanted to mark the kid with a Mormon imprimatur so there will be no mistake about their religious commitments.

And then there is my sister and my recent niece. My sister holds to a more colorful and slightly hipper religious ideology, so she was planning to name her daughter Jaya, which is Hindi for victory. Jaya is used by pious Hindus (and their American counterparts) to show their religious commitments. In a fit of last-minute restraint, my sister named her new daughter Rachel. I'm not sure whether there's a hidden ideological agenda there anywhere, but the name is safe enough to pass.

And now my wife, who is Hispanic, has informed me she intends to name our first child, if we have one, Micahella. Which is the Hispanic variant of Michelle. Wants to make sure the kid carries her Latin heritage on her sleeve for all to see.

The flip-side of this attitude is that displayed by the Navajo Indians. I grew up in a small town in northeastern Arizona called Holbrook. The border of the Navajo Reservation starts a few miles outside of town, and the kids from the reservation go to school in Holbrook. The Navajos have two names. One they give to the white-mans world and one they keep only among themselves. (By the way, their word for us white-eyes is biliganna, which translates most accurately as ghost). Anyway, the Navajos have two names because they believe if you know a persons name you have power over their soul. So they make an ideological point of hiding their ideology so outsiders wont have power over them.

Then there is simply the matter of funny names--names chosen for some reason other than utility and that end up being funny or curious for some reason. In an office where I worked once I used to collect and surreptitiously circulate my Annual All-Star List of Funny Client Names. Several stick in my mind even now: the wonderfully alliterative Stella Della Chella; and Jerry Berry and Harry Hands; the provocative Pleasant Sessions; the confused Queenie King; the anachronistic Hiawatha Masterson; and the (probably inadvertently) suggestive Vulva Jackson. Then there was: Fruitless Morgan (my personal favorite); Lovingood Smith; Tweezer Johnson; and Melon Sampson.

Curiosity getting the better of good manners, I asked Mr. Sampson how he came to be named Melon. As a young boy he got a job picking melons for a farmer in the Deep South. This was in the late 1930s, at a time when Social Security was just getting started and all employers were required to get Social Security cards for their employees. Since the farmer didn't know that "nigra" boy well enough to know his name, he just filled out the application on behalf of Melon Sampson. And with the vast institutional force of Social Security behind it, that became his name from that day to this.

Then there's the butt of every stand-up comics jokes: Buffy and Biff, the prototypical yuppies. Are there somewhere really someone named Buffy and Biff? I fear so.

All of which points up what seems to be to be a central malady of many cultures: the temptation to name children on the basis of ideology rather than practicality.

One would think this business of naming could be more utilitarian. Just a matter of putting easy to remember (and pronounce!) labels on things, to assist in the practical business of referring. As in: Give me one of those widgets over there, or My Jane, you look lovely today. (In fact, I harbor the secret theory that the reason Lech Walsea has up to now been so popular with Americans is because he has a name which is easy for Americans to spell and pronounce. I suspect no Polish patriot with the usual 49-consonant name could grace the cover of People magazine and become an American pop hero the way Walsea did.)

Why all this fuss about words? After all, a rose is a rose, as we knows. If we called it a nose or a hose, what difference could it pose?

The problem, I think, is that we have a screwed-up philosophy of words, and I blame that son-of-a-bitch Wittgenstein for it. A few words of explanation are in order.

There are four basic theories about words and their role in our world:

1) The Common-Sense View (this is my horse in the race).

The Common Sense View holds that names are just labels for things; the world is composed of various chunks of stuff, and names are just the way we delineate one chunk from another. Words in general mean whatever we decide by consensus that they should mean. Makes common sense to me.

2) The Metaphysical View.

The great temptation of many of my fellow citizens is to think that words have some kind of deep, mystical meaning. Words, in and of themselves, are important in the extreme. Important enough to make ideological points in naming our offspring, and important enough to hide them or flaunt them, depending upon just which ideology we hold. (This is the view I have been belittling up to now, but now I shall expand the circle of my scorn.)

These two are the untutored views of common folks, and I think at least one of them is basically true. Sophisticated philosophers, however, have spun more elaborate mischief from this simple silk.

3) Logical Positivism.

Now these are certainly a couple of 75-cent words when there must be some 25-cent words which would do just as well. But these folks were called logical positivists for the simple reason that they were positive everything in the world was logical. Boy, I don't know about you, but I am fairly certain that such an obviously false premise was bound to lead them into trouble, and sooner rather than later. And it did. But in any event, the madcap idea here is that all of language can be reduced to a set of logical or mathematical symbols, which probably only a few dozen people in the world can really understand. Might play havoc with getting the correct change at the grocery store, but that's the view.

The itch which the Positivists were trying to scratch is that philosophical problems have always been the toughest of all problems on which to come to closure. The Positivists in the early part of the 20th century thought the problem with philosophy was lack of precision in the language involved. Mathematics and formal logic were their models for certain knowledge and for problems which come to indisputable closure. So their idea was to reduce all of human knowledge to a small set of basic logical axioms which you could carry on a card in your wallet. All knowledge would then be just elaborations of these basic formulas.

So the basic idea here is that when I think I am referring to Sally's fanny when I say Hmmm, that Sally sure has a nice fanny, in actuality I am making a sterile statement of a complex mathematical formula--if I was just smart enough to realize it.

My favorite Logical Positivist was Bertrand Russell, who was as good as his word. In the years 1910-1913 Russell and his sidekick, Alfred North Whitehead, published a monumental work entitled the Principia Mathematica (The Principles of Mathematics) which attempted the very reductionist effort they promised. The effort foundered however, when a smart ass logician named Frege sent Russell a polite postcard on which he pointed out a few mistakes in the early math. Ultimately, a very odd duck named Kurt Godel proved that even mathematics, much less common speech, cannot be reduced to a single set of basic axioms from which all other truths can be derived. I mean he proved it mathematically and that dashed the hopes of the Logical Positivists once and for all.

At this world-weary and skeptical moment in time it sounds positively giddy to assert that all of human knowledge might be reduced to a set of mathematical equations. But at the start of this century earnest and sober people thought this was almost within their grasp, and there was a time when, to their eyes at least, it looked like they might be right. After Logical Positivism collapsed, the 20th century gave us one last gasping attempt to force closure on the ages-old debates of philosophy.

4) Ordinary Language Philosophy.

A very austere and desiccated fellow named Ludwig Wittgenstein founded what came to be known as the Ordinary Language school of philosophy. No, this is not what it sounds like. This is not, surprise-surprise, philosophers talking common sense that any ordinary person might follow. No, the idea here is that there are no genuine philosophical problems. All the great philosophical problems of the ages are just confusions about language. Words which seem to have meaning, which seem to refer to things, really don't. And this can be made obvious after much obscure, confusing, impossible to understand, arcane language used by highly sophisticated philosophers. (So what else is new, you say.)

The depressing idea here is that when it comes to any fairly elaborate use of language we are just confused, that's all. So when I refer to Sally's posterior, I may well be referring to something else altogether, and I need the help of a professional philosopher to figure out just what the actual object of my attention may be.

The pathetic little ordinary language philosophers spent careers combing through satchels of words; a grimy little business of intellectual clerks with ink-stained sleeves dragging their quills through layers of yellowing manuscripts, straining over this word and that derivation, and leeching the color from language until nothing is left but scratches in the dust. After it was all said and done, they would declare, with an air of victory, that no meaning whatever could be found in our discourse.

Although Russell himself was done-in by Frege and Godel, he did live long enough to offer (for my money) the definitive refutation of ordinary language philosophy--and he did it by telling a charming little story.

It seems Russell was bicycling one day in the English countryside and he got lost. He passed a small shop along the way so he stopped and went in to ask for directions. He approached the fellow at the counter and asked the shortest way to Westchester. The man turned and called out to an unseen colleague in a back room: Fellow here wants to know the shortest way to Westchester. Westchester? the voice replied. Aye. Shortest way? Aye. Shortest way to Westchester? Aye. Don't know.

And that, said Russell, was the kind of help offered to us by the ordinary language philosophers. And that, implied Russell, was that, for those rascals. I quite agree.

So, language has meaning. It moves around and sidles about a bit, but it ultimately means what we want it to mean. A rose means a rose. And Sally's fanny, well . . .

And language isn't just disguised mathematics. Language has an element of the conventional in it, but once the conventions have been comfortably settled we all know with ease just what we mean by what we say. And language isn't mystical or metaphysical or ideological, its just a tool, a tool for manipulating our shared world in useful ways.

The point is: names don't really matter; they're just tags, like the little tags on Christmas presents--just temporary expedients to assist in identifying things.

O.K., so now I have to come clean. My name is an ideological agenda of sorts too. Years ago, my father confessed to me that he named me Larry after a book by the same name which he had recently read and which moved him so much he named me after its lead character. This came as startling information to me, and when he pointed out the very book on the shelf I was very nearly mortified. A slim red volume with the simple name LARRY in large letters on the cover lay there, unnoticed by me all these years and yet it held meaning of a sort for me, for my very name. I shuddered to think of what Larry my father had in mind when he looked down at his pink little son and thought to himself, Ah yes, my boy, someday you will grow up to be just like Larry. To this day, I have never touched this book, for fear of what I might find.

But I swear, if I ever do have a daughter, her name will be Jane. And if I ever do have a son I will call him Dick. For some of us, the simple ways are the best.