Ever since reading Eric Rugara’s post about things not existing until they are named, I have been thinking a lot about names and what weight they may hold. Names are tools and the power lies in how they are wielded. They can maim, they can embrace, they can be vessels for knowledge. They can imprison, they can reinvent, they can abolish.
Names are sponges that absorb ideas and imbue those ideas with new meanings.
I was deeply intrigued by Rugara’s post, but I noticed that his rumination on naming was typically about how names reinform things that already exist. One thing I wanted to explore that Rugara did not touch on was how names can cause something—or someone—to disappear.
In Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, in chapter 5 titled “Grandmother Spider”, Solnit mentions “the business of naming”. This refers to the historical act of women vanishing under their husbands’ names once they marry. I am not saying that current women have no control over their last names once they marry, but the act of taking the man’s name is traditionally due to the idea (which once was a law) that women were their husband’s property. I won’t elaborate here as I highly recommend Men Explain Things to Me, but I did think the that the concept of naming can also cause someone to disappear entirely (in this case an entire matriline) was interesting.
A name can also cause someone to “disappear” into their role of parent once they have a child. In South Korea, when a woman gives birth, she is no longer called by her own name but by the name of her child plus “mother.” So if a woman has a child name Jiyoung, she is now referred to as “Jiyoung’s mother” or “mother of Jiyong”. This is the case for fathers as well. I did some brief research on this phenomenon, and it is not restricted to South Korea.
This naming convention is prevalent in a variety of cultures across the world, and this act is called teknonymy. This occurrence makes sense as the cultures who practice teknonymy are more collective, but I wonder where does the name go? Does becoming a parent eclipse the individual you once were? Is it an act of disappearance or metamorphosis? Maybe teknonymy shows that, like love and grief, becoming a parent is all-encompassing. You will never be the person you were before your child came to fruition, and even if that child were to pass before you, you will never be the same after.
I think another way that naming can cause something—or entire ideas—to disappear is through the death of a language. I haven’t done much research on language death and would love to explore more in a later mini essay, but I wanted to briefly mention it here. In many cultures, language is soddened with words that specifically name phenomena that cannot be thoroughly translated without some meaning being wrung out. One example is the Irish name for “dark clouds on the horizon” (mada doininne, literally translated to mean “hounds of the storm”. One can imagine vicious black dogs crouched above the sealine, their collective growls the rumbling thunder). A mouthful of words in English becomes poetry in Irish. It becomes more than the phenomenon it describes, it becomes its name. If that language were to die completely, where do all these names go?
Carismatic Scholar 