Part of a continuation of a discussion I’ve had with a couple of people, I’ve decided to write my thoughts down and share it out so that people can think about it and write back their opinions with regards to it.

It has occurred to me that nothing seems to be named properly. Let me point out here that when I speak of names I’m referring to everyday devices we use; not so much names of people. I have been contemplating lately that things we handle and use and refer to seem to have meaningless, implicit, or just boring names and they either fall into one of the following categories; a) a name that describes its function, b) a cliché reference to a historical/mythological figure, c) a name that describes the unit to be inspirational or revolutionary.

I think for these categories I ought to elaborate and set examples to what I am referring to. I think firstly I can quite simply say that all categories a, b, and c have been well exploited by NASA to name their space ships, e.g. :

1. Explorer – how dull is that?
2. Apollo – Greek god of light?
3. Challenger – how pretentious is that?

The point I’m trying to put across is that in a couple of centuries from now if our (un)civilized ways are still lingering, how will we look back upon our generation of misleading and ironic and clichéd names? What does this tell our children?

Previous to now, words would be invented to give meaning to things. Now we give names with reference to things that did have meaning which is instead of creating a new word to name/lable it. It makes me angry that we live in such a dull era. Why can’t we just throw syllables together and make up words? or is there a syllable concatenation ban?

Opinions?

Examples of invented (good) names that I can think of in the last 100 years: Googol, Klingon, Vogon…..

posted by a-v0id at 6:07 pm & filed under Uncategorizable! | No Comments »