Quotes About Naming

Of Beginnings and the Names of Things S

Interested in the guy's name?" "Nah. Drop him in front of a door and we could call him Mat," I said.

The labels on the little bottles and boxes do not tell you which one is the sleeping pill. Instead they have names, long strange names that slide out of shape while you are reading them. They sound like kings from history or alien planets. There are hundreds of them.

In some cultures they don't name their babies right away. They wait until they see how the child develops. Like in Dances with Wolves. Unfortunately, our kids' names would be less romantic and poetic. "This is my oldest boy, Falls off His Tricycle, his friend, Dribbles His Juice, and my beautiful daughter, Allergic to Nuts."

Normally, I name my characters after famous comedians.

We will call him Anthony Alexander Barrington. After my father and brother. We'll call him Alexander.

this dialogue cannot be reduced to the act of one person's "depositing" ideas in another, nor can it become a simple exchange of ideas to be "consumed" by the discussants. Nor yet is it a hostile, polemical argument between those who are committed neither to the naming of the world, nor to the search for truth, but rather to the imposition of their own truth.

Dialogue cannot exist without humility. The naming of the world, through which people constantly re-create that world, cannot be an act of arrogance....Men and women who lack humility (or have lost it) cannot come to the people, cannot be their partners in naming the world.

To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming,. Human beings are not built in silence,3 but in word, in work, in action-reflection.

Leaving something unnamed makes it quite literally unspeakable: a void, an absence, a taboo.

I control the world so long as I can name it. Which is why children must chase language before they do anything else, tame the wilderness by describing it, challenge God by learning His hundred names.

Satan loves to name you, because names catch people, control people, and shape people. This world love[s] to name us. We're susceptible to names because [we believe] we're orphaned and widowed--we're so desperate, we believe them. But the one we let name us is our idol...our god our father and groom.

And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and He brought them to the man to see what he would name each one. And whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.

The man gave names to all the livestock, to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field. But for Adam no suitable helper was found.

And Adam named his wife Eve, because she would be the mother of all the living.

Then Leah said, “How fortunate!” So she named him Gad.

Again she conceived and gave birth to a son, and she named him Onan.

Then she gave birth to another son and named him Shelah; it was at Chezib that she gave birth to him.

And Nobah went and captured Kenath and its villages and called it Nobah, after his own name.

And the man went to the land of the Hittites, built a city, and called it Luz, which is its name to this day.

On the eighth day, when they came to circumcise the child, they were going to name him after his father Zechariah.

So they made signs to his father to find out what he wanted to name the child.