Why do things have the name they have?
Why is water water, eau, agua, biyo, amanzi, mmiri and so many other
words? It is always water, dihydrogen monoxide, hydroxyl acid,
hydrogen oxide, hydrogen hydroxide, hydric acid, hydroxic acid, or μ
-oxido dihydrogen. All the
same stuff, dozens of different names.
Even
within a single culture and language, things have more than one name.
Ignoring slang terms, pants can be called pants, jeans, capris,
knickerbockers, jodhpurs, slacks, trousers, breeches, britches,
pantaloons, dungarees, drawers, corduroys, chinos, khakis...
All
these words, these rich, wonderful little variations on a single
theme. All these ways to speak of a thing, all derived from the same
idea, the same kind of object, the same class of entity. Every
language speaks of these things, and yet the words fly singing into
the night from different tongues in different ways. With joy, with
wailing, with love, with hatred, with regret, boredom or fear. We
speak of these things in so many ways, taking sound and making it
into a way of understanding something. We speak of these things to
each other and the world is transmitted between us. With
these names, and the names for things we have not yet discovered, we
become new things, make over ourselves, our friends, our families,
even our enemies.
Names
are magic and music and power and loss. We lose the thing itself in
the naming of it, but so also do we gain something else. In losing
that uniqueness that a single thing is, we gain the understanding
that it is, in some way, like so many other things.
In
naming, we move. We grow. We become.
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