There’s a weird myth in my family about names. There’s this idea that whatever you name your child imbues the child with the elements of that name; names become important in a way that’s more than just what you’re called.
My name, Francesca, was given to me to match my last name, Morizio, mostly to sound nice and Italian. But it also means “freedom” or, specifically, “freedom from France” in Latin.
(I’ve been to Gaul and the police haven’t arrested me, so I hope I’m living up to my name.)
We think of names as something you give children or new products. When a new As-Seen-On-TV item is clearly a mashed together “made-up” word we have a tendency to take it less seriously because there just isn’t something right about what’s it’s called.
But here’s the thing about words in general: Any name we give an object is, in no way, connected to that object, except for the fact that someone arbitrarily chose to put that combination of sounds with that object.
There is nothing intrinsic in the object that you’re holding while reading this that has any link at all to “newspaper” or “website” if you’re online. Someone just chose to call it that and it stuck. Yes, it might have come about because of the combination of what it is made of and what it contains, but do those words have any real connection to what they represent?
When it comes down it to, there is nothing inherently in any object or feeling that links to its name.
Think of that shiny red fruit we all gave our grammar school teachers and the word “apple.” But manzana and pomme also signify that same object, as do hundreds of other sounds. “Apple” really has nothing to do with that fruit; it’s just the accepted sound for that object.
There’s also the idea that the only way we know what words mean is by knowing and understanding what they don’t mean. You can’t understand a word in a vacuum; you have to know what it doesn’t mean before you can begin to know what it does mean. We only know what a table is because it isn’t a chair or a stool.
There’s some dense literary theory at play here, but the esoteric nature of those essays doesn’t really matter because they argue for the idea that words, language itself, is completely made up. We all chose to accept that words mean what we think they do because we don’t have a better way of communicating. We completely buy into the idea that the sounds we make indeed are the object to which they refer.
That’s weird to think about, even if it is true. Our entire foundation for communication is based on a general agreement that certain sounds are associated with certain things.
We think of words as concrete ideas, that we all know exactly what someone means when they say “love” when in fact they could mean so many different things. I love my dog and I love hockey but I don’t love it the same way I love a man. It’s not even that “love” has multiple definitions, but that words mean different things to different people. I love the Caps but not in the die-hard fan way that some people love that team.
Words are really just abstractions, placeholders for objects and ideas because we don’t have a better way to communicate. They are essential, of course, but there is still wavering and changing even in what we hops is a concrete definition.
So the next time you’re paper is late and your professor is giving you a hard time, simply tell them that the sounds “paper,” “due date” and “on time” don’t actually mean anything because sounds are only randomly chosen to have the meaning you’re professor is choosing to use them for.
Though the only departments I think that might fly in is Literature or Philosophy. And even then, it would be a stretch.
Francesca Morizio is double major in CAS and Kogod.
edpage@theeagleonline.com
