Quotes About Naming

There are other ways women have been made to disappear. There is the business of naming.In some cultures women keep their names, but in most their children take the father's name, and in the English-speaking world until very recently, prefaced by Mrs. You stopped, for example, being Charlotte Bronte and became Mrs. Arthur Nicholls. Names erased a woman's genealogy and even her existence.

It is difficult, sometimes even impossible, to value what cannot be named or described, and so the task of naming and describing is an essential one in any revolt against the status quo of capitalism and consumerism.

If we eliminate the word writer, if we just go back to writing as an act of listening and naming what we hear, some of the rules dissappear. There is an organic shape, a form-coming-into-form that is inherent in the thing we are observing, listening to, and trying to put on the page. It has rules of its own that it will reveal to us if we listen with attention. Shape does not need to be imposed. Shape is a part of what we are listening to. When we just let ourselves write, we get it right.

But the very action of naming something that subsequently happens—of wishing specific evil, and that evil coming to pass—this still has a shiver of the otherworldly about it.

I can't help but think that it's an unfortunate custom to name children after people who come to sticky ends. Even if they are fictional characters, it doesn't bode well for the poor things. There are too many Judes and Tesses and Clarissas and Cordelias around. If we must name our children after literary figures then we should search out happy ones, although it's true they are much harder to find.

On the outside of the bedroom door there was a plaque that said Valerie . On the way up, Jackson noticed that other bedrooms also had names - Eleanor, Lucy, Anna, Charlotte .Jackson wondered how you decided on a name for a room. Or a doll. Or a child, for that matter. The naming of dogs seemed even more perplexing.

They all chose Indian names for themselves. Teddy was Little Fox ("Naturally," Ursula said). Nancy was Little Wolf ("Honiahaka" in Cheyenne, Mrs. Shawcross said. She had a book she referred to). Mrs. Shawcross herself was Great White Eagle ("Oh, for heaven's sake," Sylvie said, "talk about hubris").

Literature... is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most reliable of terms in which man names and transforms himself.

I called my cat William because no shorter name fits the dignity of his character. Poor old man, he has fits now, so I call him Fitz-William.

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.

Does a name stick because it suits a man or does the man, unconsciously, evolve into his name?

I think a child should be allowed to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction.

My mother wanted to name me Jackie or Jacqueline but she got to name my sister and my brother, so my dad and my brother insisted on naming me. And they were big fans of 'The Little Mermaid.'

But she named the infant "Pearl," as being of great price-purchased with all she had-her mother's only treasure!

It's my real name. My mother's name is Rose Rock. It was the worst name as a kid to have. They called me Piece of the Rock, Plymouth Rock, Joe Rockid, and Flintstones. Now they call me Mister Rock.

I was named after Yul Brynner because my mother had an infatuation with him. Who the hell names a Cuban kid Yul? Talk about a torturous childhood.

Tribe cats are named after the first thing their mother sees, but I thing this would lead to a lot of kits being named 'wall of cave', 'side of cave' and 'floor of cave

We do what we must, and call it by the best names.

It's like soul music, isn't it all soul music? Otherwise what is it, non-soul music? I-have-no-soul music? Soulless music? People need to put a name on something to identify it, and I understand it.

It's magazines like HITS that have to label things.

Name the season's first hurricane Zelda and fool Mother Nature into calling it a year.

A poet's job is to find a name for everything: to be a fearless finder of the names of things.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.

What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.