A NAMELESS WORLD?

A NAMELESS WORLD?

Before attempting to respond to Reedsy’s prompt about a nameless world I thought I would write about a name full world and see the difference. Here it is: Everything sentient and non-sentient has names. A name is the word by which a person, animal, place or thing is spoken of. To start writing this blog I need paper and pen. Without names these objects can’t be identified.

People have been given names right from the time of cavemen. However such names haven’t come down to us and so when we imagine cavemen we jocularly use gog, agog, magog and the like as possibilities of caveman lingo, We don’t know anything about aliens and call those we imagine to come from Mars as Martians.

Man wondered about the planet and considering law and order, created ideas about virtuous living and rewards of heaven and hell besides a supreme creator he called God. Different faiths evolved and have produced the nomenclature of heavenly beings and God intoxicated folk called saints. They devised myths and produced books we call holy. The names of saints and of those in their books became the norm for baby’s names. There were onomatopoeic abbreviations  to show love and affection of parents for children. Each country choses names appropriately. In course of time new names are chosen. Djugashvili turned into Stalin. The distortion of names continues. Any pronounceable or even unpronounceable name has come to be accepted. However people who won’t forsake their roots stick to adopting the name of their ancestral village or their birth asterism in their names. In India the practice of lengthy hyphenated names is coming to an end with citizens shortening names for passports and visas.

A US citizen once wanted to change his name into numerals but was prevented after legal action. The court ruled that names couldn’t be digital and had to be based on the alphabet. Names are for recognition and communication. When the shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe on a lonely island got a helper, he called him ‘Friday’. Any handle would do! Vampires and other supernatural beings created by literati were named Dracula or Frankenstein and they live their lives in our minds. Jonathan Swift in his “Gulliver’s travels” created a brute in human shape named ‘Yahoo’.

Of what use are names? Of course they are used as handle, and were probably convenient to instal in headstones after funerals. Many funereal messages have been carved thereon. Some of them are hilarious. (At last she is at peace and so on adducing to the character trait of the dead person.) Though it is said let not the left hand know what the right hand donates to charity the donor’s name is made public and he is honoured. Streets are named after prominent persons who lived there. Presently in India street names often change when political fortunes are reversed. Or perhaps the street name is set in the vernacular to honour for example  an uneducated warrior who had lived says 2 or 3 centuries ago. He could perhaps find moving about easily in the metropolis when he lands in the unfamiliar surrounding! Almost every Indian city has a street, a park, a market or a memorial to the great leader Mahatma Gandhi.

Professionals have their niche of immortality by their names being applied appropriately to their discoveries or their work. The ampere, the watt, curie point, gauss, Fermat’s theorem and the like are some examples. A Nobel prize is considered the highest honour for achievement in a number of fields. We recognize the greatness of the awardee on hearing of the award to him/her. Names are prominent in many fields: The man who is a billionaire, the cine superstar, the sportsmen who have excelled in their sport, even criminals and others who were imprisoned, facts on love and sex and so on. All these have been furnished in what are called Books of Lists. The books appropriately include brief personal data and are both informative and entertaining. Without names the book wouldn’t have been a success. They couldn’t be published in a nameless world! I loved a book of lists and as I was browsing it again I saw I had the name of a chastity belt maker in Sheffield in England in the 20^th century! This was while I was reading about the most often kissed statue in history: The figure of a Guidarelli sculpted in marble was on display. A rumour started that any woman who kissed the reclining armour-clad statue would marry a wonderful gentleman. Some 4 to 5 million women have kissed the man’s cold lips. It said consequently the soldier’s mouth has acquired a faint reddish glow!

Writing about names we have to consider names given to our pets. A friend was given a Lhasa-apso male pup. He searched google for an appropriate name to be carved in the collar. He chose TZU and choosing an expensive name plate ordered it to be engraved with the dog’s name. The man who took the order instructed the engraver accordingly. However the new boy who did the engraving didn’t understand the needed spelling and made it ZOO! The work had to be redone. With Korean, Japanese and Chinese words in use one has to be careful.

We create cartoon characters. We have Flintstone, Donald duck etc and some wear T-shirts with imitation characters. An Indian construction worker had a T-shirt with Chinese writing on it. I suppose none except someone who could read Chinese script could read it. I assumed it was a company name. The labourer had worked in Kampuchea where he was given the T-shirt. The lettering attracted me. I took a picture of it and sending it to someone I knew asked about what it read. He came back: “It is Mandarin and says humorously ‘I’m a THIEF of hearts. Beware!’ The word for thief has been magnified.”

Names have passed into idioms. When we say ‘every Tom Dick and Harry’ we only mean the common man disparagingly. And when we say “I’m calling a spade a spade’ we mean we were speaking clearly and directly.

These are days of AI. From cavemen we have come to computers which have become predominant. My laptop recognizes me as zLyYm96bcQ which is my unpronounceable password before welcoming me! The computer of course felicitated me on the strength of my password! Dear reader, a word in apology: That password has long since been changed! We are surely approaching a nameless world! However would I like to live in it? Certainly an emphatic NO!

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