I'm currently reading the book We by Yevgeny Zamyatin which is about a dystopian society in which the government yields absolute control. In the book, the citizens of the society (which is referred to as the One State) do not have names such as Jennifer or Brian, but rather are assigned a letter followed by a number. For example, the main character is named D-503 and his "girlfriend" (by the One State's permission) is named O-90.
This reminded me of Hayakawa's comments about the primitive belief that one's name has a certain power over that person on pg. 48. Hayakawa feels that a name is simply a symbol, and that this primitive belief is a result of the confusion between word and thing. But as I continued reading We, I couldn't help but feel as if names really do have some special sort of "power". This left me with the question of whether one's name really means anything. Is it a defining part of our lives? Does it make us unique? Or is it simply a word, like all other words? Opinions?
-Bryce Cody
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I believe that it is not the name that defines us, but how we view the name. As long as we THINK it makes us unique, it does. However, there is nothing about the name that specifically has power over us. Hayakawa gave the example of someone wanting to name their child a particular name, but didn't because they knew somebody by that name who had committed suicide. It is most likely that the child would not have committed suicide because of his name.
ReplyDeleteAs with most words, it is the feelings we associate with our names that have the most power over us. Although I have not read the book you were talking about, I can guess that having letters and numbers instead of names make the characters feel less human. The reason some people change their first names is because they associate negative feelings with them.
-Audrey Kindsfather
The belief that a person's true name can have power over that person can also be seen in Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle books. In Eragon, it is established that a person is given an everyday name and also a true name, one which sometimes the person himself doesn't even know. The true name is the combination of the words that truly describe who a person was, maybe 3 traits that get to the very essence of a person. If anybody knew a person's true name, he could order that person around and that person would be completely under control. Of course, the book was a fantasy book, but it certainly does make me question the significance of names having more meaning than mere symbols.
ReplyDeleteMy full name is Victoria but I've been called Tori by my friends since I started school. When people figure out that my full name is Victoria, they insist, "But you don't look like a Victoria, you look like a Tori." I don't think anybody can look like his or her name. They just knew me ever since they met me as Tori and cannot imagine me differently. People just go off of unconscious judgments from past Victorias they met, or past Victorias throughout history. They subconsciously associate an affective connotation or even an informative connotation with a name. But I think that names do have significance in our lives.
Some names define certain time periods. Names go through fads (such as Tricia, from the Wired magazine link) and those fads could reveal something about the time period. Tricia could be a name of a certain socioeconomic group: maybe only wealthy, upperclass parents named their kids Tricia for a decade. Then when these Tricias grow up, they may have a better chance of getting a job at a job interview because employers already judged these Tricias by their name before even meeting them, guessing that they are upper class. This name-judging could happen in the opposite effect as well, Tricia could be generally viewed as a name from a lower class social standing. This process would of course be stereotyping and, more broadly, abstracting, so would always have exceptions.
Some last names also reveal ethnic background, which as the CNN article says, has an effect on employers as well. Hard-to-pronounce names could be turn-offs, as well as names by which people cannot take somebody seriously. These pre-judgments are subconscious, difficult to stop (in a previous blog we all debated about how subconscious thoughts are subconscious and by definition nearly impossible to cease), and illegal. Yet we all do it. "You don't look like your name." "Your name is traditionally a rich name." "I don't like your name because I didn't like King Henry IV." And so on. Sorry it was a long comment!
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/05/baby-names-quantify-the-faddishness-of-fads/
http://money.cnn.com/2009/08/26/news/economy/applicant_names/index.htm?postversion=2009082712
-- tori lee
Elaborating on what Tori said in the middle of her post, I find it strange when people say that others LOOK like a name. I can't say that I am not guilty of doing this, however. Sometimes I say people look like names because I know others with that name that have some resemblance to the person, but sometimes I don't. I have even seen people get into arguments over what name they think a person looks like. Why do we do this?
ReplyDelete-Alexa Kaczmarski
In response to Alexa's question, most likely we have created some sort of association to the name in the past, even though we may not have a recollection of exactly when the association was made. For example, we may not personally know someone with a certain name, but may have read a novel or seen a few minutes of a show that allowed us to make a judgment about that name. I think that for the most part people are stubborn and will fight in order to keep their original judgments alive, no matter how unfounded they might be.
ReplyDelete-Tara Burns
Names serve quite a few purposes. In certain cultures, parents tend to name their children after themselves, in order to keep a family name going. Some people look up the meaning of words and name their child based on its meaning, not just the word.
ReplyDeleteIt seems very debasing to be assigned random letters and numbers for a "name." It demonstrates exactly how the government in the book treats the people: as if they were robots.
-Chloe Martianou
I believe that names do carry a certain significance, that they are not just "words". Their importance is rooted in one's culture and social life.
ReplyDeleteI've read the book Freakonomics this summer, which has a chapter that addresses the importance of names. The authors pose the questions: Does a name affect whether or not a prospective employer will hire someone? Are there names that sound "black" or "white"? Are certain names correlated with a person's socioeconomic background?
The findings of this investigation (of popular baby names for various classes of people over the decades) revealed that blacks and whites chose very different names for their babies, and that names can carry implications of how wealthy and educated a person is. Names do go through fads, and the trends are usually started at the top of the social pyramid - names that are popular among wealthy, educated people become popular for the middle class, and later the lower, poorer population. It would seem that parents try to give their children names that sound "richer" or "better educated".
As for looks, I would say that names do carry some implications of a person's apperance. If I signed this post as "Patty O'Brien" you'd probably think I were a freckled Irish lass with pale skin and possibly red hair. Names like "Muhammad", "Rodriguez", or "Heidi" also carry cultural connotations.