Quotes About Naming

On the first day of school, my teacher, Miss Mdingane, gave each of us an English name and said that from thenceforth that was the name we would answer to in school. This was the custom among Africans in those days and was undoubtedly due to the British bias of our education.

What goes unnamed remains hard to correct.

She put him near the front door and a number of visitors were surprised that he would not answer to the name 'Polly', which is what all parrots were supposed to be called.

Numbers are a bad idea for names because people won't know whether to use numerals (123) or to spell out the number (One Two Three).

The name Jack was given by an American tourist.

When Constance was born, Aunt Glo named her after the dormitory she lived in at college: Constance Hall.

You don't just choose a name at random. A name is a name. A major responsibility.

He names the stars and knows the sparrows.

They also told me how I got the name "My." After Bailey learned definitely that I was his sister, he refused to call me Marguerite, but rather addressed me each time as "Mya Sister," and in later more articulate years, after the need for brevity had shortened the appellation to "My," it was elaborated into "Maya.

For a few seconds it was a tossup over whether I would laugh (imagine being named Hallelujah) or cry (imagine letting some white woman rename you for her convenience).

And the Earth had no name. The gods know themselves and have no need of names. It is man who names all things, even gods.

She had an unusual name. She knew that much. It wasn't the kind of name that you found on ceramic coffee mugs at airport gift shops or emblazoned on mini-license plate souvenirs you could hang on your bedroom door after you returned from Disneyland. Her name was pretty and unusual and had meaning.

Often in my lectures when I use the phrase "imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy" to describe our nation's political system, audiences laugh. No one has ever explained why accurately naming this system is funny. The laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism. It functions as a disclaimer, discounting the significance of what is being named. It suggests that the words themselves are problematic and not the system they describe.

Naming oppressive realities, in and of itself, has not brought about the kinds of changes for oppressed groups that it can for more privileged groups, who command a different quality of attention.

RCA wanted me to change my name. They asked me around 1965, when they first signed me. They said, 'Feliciano is too Latin.' I said, 'That's who I am. I'm Jose Feliciano.' They wanted me to change my name to Joe Phillips.

Idly, I wondered what it'd be like to have a city street named after me. Kinsey Avenue. Kinsey Road. Not bad. I figured I could learn to live with the tribute if it came my way.

We must wake up, journey, name, challenge, shed, reclaim, ground, and heal.

Handful was my basket name.

Lisa's baby was due about now. I've decided she had it and it was a girl. I've named her Rachel.

With characteristic exuberance Tom named this curiously constructed house Castel des Tours saunz Nowmbre, which means the Castle of Innumerable Towers. David Montefiore had counted the innumerable towers in 1764. There were fourteen of them.

The tendency is always strong to believe that whatever receives a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own. John Stuart Mill, 1869

It was my mom's doing. He would not have thought enough of himself to want anyone to have his name. Except when he was manic, when he probably would have happily named me Conrad Conrad Conrad.

I come from a culture of handwringers, vengeance seekers, people who name children after ancestors by rote -- first child, paternal grandfather, second child, maternal, and on and on and on.

Naming suffering, exalting it, dissecting it into its smallest components – that is doubtless a way to curb mourning.