Part IV of a Greater-Than-One part series. Read Part I, II, and III for Context.
Freaks, Geeks and Name-Nerds
If I’m sure of anything it’s this: the world is full of Us.
Undoubtedly, the world is full of us: Freaks and Geeks, Kooks and Crazies; Looney Toons and Lentils, Weirdos, Wackos, Wack-jobs, Nut-jobs, Nut-cases and Basket-cases; Odd-balls, Goof-balls, Soft-balls, Blue-balls, Base-balls, Eight-balls and “goodness-gracious, Great-balls of fire”; Dill-weeds, Dill-wads, Dill-holes, Dill-heads, Dope-heads, Old-heads, Hot-heads, Cheese-heads, Bone-heads, Dead-heads, Phish-heads, Fish-bones, Dog-bones, T-bones, and ice-laying Zambon’s; Zambians, Gambians, Gambling men, Amphibians, Agrarians, Librarians, Libertarians and Contrarians; there are Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters, and Fences and Flatterers, Jokers and Jesters, and Chesses and Checkers, Chickens and Chicory, and Twix and Trickery, Liz & Don Lemons and Yoko & John Lennons; Bed-Wetters and Super-Spreaders, By-the-Books and Improvisational Cooks, Christopher Walkens and “Ooh, you don’t have a reservation? Hmmm—Hey, uh, Kat?—Yeah, uh, can we seat a couple Walk-Ins?”; Popsicle Toes and Mr. Poopy Buttholes, Dinguses and Dingleberries, Vagabonds and Valedictorians, Quarterbacks and Nickelbacks, Slick Ricks and First-Round Picks, People with Nicknames and People—well, people just named Nick. The world is full of these Types. Chock full of Us.
I used to run from all this Name-calling. But over the years I’ve realized all they are is names. Most of them are endearing, anyhow. And besides—I mean, people get called much worse. Example:
There’s a particular Type of Freak—more aptly: Geek or, politely, Nerd—I happened upon just this week. They’re called Onomasts, an undoubtedly upper-case brand of Nerd. Can You guess why, Kind Reader? Nailed it. Onomasts are the particular Type of Nerd obsessed with Names—their history, their sound-formation, their context. Onomasts are people who read books titled, Rhetorics of Names and Inferring Gender from Name Phonology, and create scientific quarterly magazines dedicated to articles like: “Corn Belt as an Enterprising-Name Custom in the United States”, “Usernames on a Finnish Online Marketplace for Illegal Drugs”, and “Turkish Patronymic Surnames Ending with -oğlu ‘Son of’: A Corpus Linguistic Investigation”. Like I said, real Nerds.
Suckers for Proper Nouns they are, these Kooks have, obviously, given themselves a proper name: the American Name Society (ANS). Real Creative name for a US-based society of Name-Nerds, huh? The Name-Nerds produce an academic journal aptly titled…You guessed it: Names. Part of the wild fun they have there at Names, is crowning Winners of the Name of the Year1. (I cannot iterate this this enough: real, genuine Nerds.)
As fate would have it, the 2021 Winners were announced earlier this month. Let’s see what the Name-Nerds came up with, shall we? Drumroll, please…
Name of the Year: Great Resignation
WHAAAA?? Uh-uh, no they di’n’t! Great Resignation?! Sheesh, these Name-Nerds be wylin’! Please hold back your cheer-screams, if you can…
Quick explanation from the ANS for those who also don’t keep up with The News (Hello, fellow Under-Rock Dweller): “socioeconomic trend in 2021 in which millions of employees left their jobs”. I would call this the Great Liberation not the Great Resignation. But what do I know, I’m not (officially) a Name-Nerd.
Let’s see what else they came up with, those raucous, wild, rabble-rouser Name-Nerds.
Here are the six Category Winners for 2021, including parenthetical Context copied directly from ANS (Context is probably Unnecessary for most Readers, considering You made it through 2021–you go, Glen Coco2!):
Artistic Name: Squid Game (the blockbuster South Korean survival film on Netflix)
Trade Name: Cyber Ninjas (partisan-backed company that reviewed votes in Maricopa County, Arizona after the national election of democratic candidate Joseph R. Biden to become the 46th US President)
Personal Name: Karen (a name that is increasingly used as pejorative term to label a person considered to be racist, arrogant, and rude. CAUTION: This negative usage has caused considerable damage to people who are actually named Karen.)
E-Name: #FreeBrittney3 (the movement to support singer Britney Spears in her legal battle to end a conservatorship in which her father was given the right control her estate and make decisions about her mental and physical health)
Place Name: United States Capitol (the site where a mob of thousands of pro-Trump supporters attacked the US Congress in a violent attempt to impede the ratification of Joseph R. Biden’s election as the 46th President of the United States)
Miscellaneous Name: C.R.T. (the often pejoratively used abbreviation for “Critical Race Theory”, an academic framework used for examining the historical relationship between race, law, privilege, and identity)
(Side-Note: Karen was a nominee in both 2019 and 2020. Finally a win for Karen! So proud of you, Karen! You go, Glen Kare-Kare!)
For Schitt’s & gigs, let me give you 2020’s Winners but this time without Context: Schitt’s Creek; Zoom; George Floyd; QAnon; Wuhan, China; COVID-19.
My initial reaction to reading all this was something like:
“These Onomast Freaks are out here boxing up entire Years into 6 or 7 little Names. Like, the expansive, inexhaustible, infinite randomness—the collective ‘are you still watching?’—of 8 billion people can be summed up into a Netflix show, a business, a Minnesotan, an Internet gang, a Chinese city and a common cold… Pffffff… Onomasts? More like Onanists, amirite?
“Oh, wait.”
You might be thinking to yourself right about now, Kind Reader, “what in the name of God is this Masturbatory Typer going on about?”—or maybe You leave God out of it. I don’t know.
It’s a good question, sure—but I already gave You all the ANS’s explanations.
Let’s ask something more impertinent instead: “How did you even discover the looney toon American Name Society and their wacko Name of the Year Winners, you Mad Hatter?” Ah, and here I was, thinking You’d never ask! Can You Imagine?
What Happens to Old Possum (All of Us)
Your discovery of the ANS started as everything starts nowadays: “Ah, yes!—Let me Google that—Hm…”
More specifically, it started with a poem in a book4.
The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter, It isn’t just one of your holiday games; You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES. …
Roll Over, Unlock, Type, Enter, Scroll, Click—and, somehow, you’re reading the headlines of an obituary5:
T.S. Eliot, the Poet, is Dead in London at 76
Tuesday, January 5, 1965
Writer, Born in U.S., Gained Fame With 'The Waste Land’
Special to The New York Times
You skim the section Titles:
— Lacked Flamboyance
— Tea With Students
— Taught in London
— Lectured at Harvard
Groaning, you start to think, This is awful. Why bother with all those unenlightening Titles? Wouldn’t “Academic, Lacked Flamboyance” have sufficed? You get Restless. You feel like this 1965 New York Times Obituary Writer didn’t really get to know the Poet—no more than to write an uninspired, factual, line-connecting obituary—decent enough for a rush Print, sure, but light-years from the all-encompassing, Life’s Work analysis you were hoping to absorb.
You give it a closer read. You see, above the final two-thirds of Old Possum’s poem:
These lines from "The Naming of Cats" illustrate Eliot's profound insight into the narcissistic world of the feline
You’re gonna barf. Has anyone even bothered to read the poem? Like, the whole thing? He says it, plainly. It’s “The Naming of Cats”, not “a profound insight into the narcissistic world of the feline”. Totally different!6
The issue with this 1965 New York Times obituary is, you realize, the writer merely opened an Artist-Defining Book to its first poem and quickly skimmed for a Quote. 1965 New York Times Obituary Writer never bothered to consider the Quote within the context of the Poem, or the context of the Book—or the context of the Poet, for that matter.
Now that I’ve done my job (I see You, Kind Reader, judging 1965 New York Times Obituary Writer: “No! Bad! Get down from there!”), I remember that 1965 New York Times Obituary Writer didn’t have the same problem as 22-02-2022 Sleepless iPhone Sam, who wants Everything about T.S. Eliot and the Meaning of his poem, "The Naming of Cats”, to Know the complete Identity of the Man in White Spats—to whom this Book of Practical Cats is “respectfully dedicated”—and who wants it right MEOW!7, all in one Click.
Finally (I know), we can explain this whole Thing about Names. And it’s only partially thanks to this bleary-eyed, bewitching-hour mad-Cat-hunt, which led me to discover the Name-Nerds—only one additional Click required.
Concluding This Unnecessarily (Faux-)Philosophical Series Of Things (Attempt 1)
Remember An Identity Equation? It looks like this:
Most of Us—us non-Math-Nerds—look at that equation and nearly have an aneurysm. There’s got to be something more accessible, something easier to call i than whatever endless combination of v’s, x’s and s’s and c’s we can come up with across t.
There is, of course. We give i a Name. Like, for example, Sam.
But even Sam is not the most Helpful or Unique, so we call i by a more differentiating Full Name: Sam Jacobson.
Even then, these are just “sensible everyday names.” So, we often do what our old friend Old Possum describes:
a cat needs a name that's particular, A name that's peculiar, and more dignified, … Names that never belong to more than one cat.
In human-words, we give i a Nickname, a Pet-name, or a jovial Spoonerism8.
Mostly, we do this Naming thing for ease of differentiation. So when You, Kind Reader, are talking to Someone and they ask if you’ve read anything good recently, you can say, “Uh, I don’t know? I guess? I’ve been reading this Periodic Newsletter/Journal/Column/Internet Thing that claims to do ‘Field-reporting from Inside My Mind’.”
And when they say, “Ooh, that sounds Cool! Who writes it?”
You can answer objectively, not-untruthfully, “I don’t know, some Onanistic Onomast who refers to himself as ‘Jam’.”
So, Names for differentiation, yes, but also: endearment, judgment, maybe.
Even with one of these Names, we haven’t entirely defined i. Which comes as no surprise because, as you now know by now, “The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter.” Old Possum, goes on:
But above and beyond there’s a name that’s left over, And that is the name that you never will guess The name that no human research can discover— But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
What It’s All About (Attempt 2)
The tough part was out of the way to begin with. We already had ourselves An Identity Equation before This Thing so, what in the name of Cats has This all been about?
Maybe This is my ill-conceived, poorly-executed, anecdotally-roundabout attempt to solve the equation.
But, why rush to a solution—to a conclusion? (“Certainly you haven’t, Sam. You’ve taken several weeks of my ever-so-precious Time with all this Nonsense about Names.” That’s You, Kind Reader—not Wrongly, I might add.)
Why rush to form an Identity? How can I solve the equation when I’m only a few poems into my own book? Surely I shouldn’t make the same mistake as 1965 New York Times Obituary Writer. It seems a bit premature to write my obituary already. There’s so much to be written, learned, analyzed, let alone, lived.
Maybe, then, what This is all about, simply, is: it’s kinda impossible to solve An Identity Equation.
Maybe: i really is Imaginary.
Even if you’re the best Mathematician in the world, the math doesn’t totally add up.
To solve An Identity Equation we need to know all of i’s Visible Identifiers, which—if last week’s Thing proved anything—is frustratingly complex, even if the Visible is “surface-level”; we need to know everything that is going on behind the curtain of Non-visible Identity (but there’s hardly enough time to peek behind i’s own curtain let alone Everyone’s curtain—and, speaking of); we need to observe all of Time from Zero to Infinity (and, like, Zero could be Birth—or earlier, like Genesis, or the Big Bang—and Infinity could be—Death? After-life? Fiery, Eternal… who knows what?); and, if we learned anything from This, the Names we give and get from those collectives called Society and Community don’t mean jack without a hefty dose of Context.
Context is what made You go “why’s he mansplaining what a Karen is?” while reading the 2021 Name of the Year Winners. Context is what makes looking back at Name of the Year Winners so incredible: those dozen-or-so random names really do sum up a decent chunk of the last two years of confusion, isolation, protest, revolt and reckoning.
Without Context, George Floyd is meaningless—void of the outrage, the systemic-disappointment, the call-to-action, the personal-reflection we feel now when we say his name. Without Context, George Floyd is just a name. He may as well be a failed ‘60s British Invasion rocker (“Did ye’ hear that new George Floyd number? S’called ‘Silver Spoon Delight’—quite psychedelic, actually, really rather groovy—bloody brilliant if ye’ ask me”). Knowing about George Floyd’s brutal murder, about Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, about the history of countless Names lost to police brutality before and since George Floyd—that’s what makes saying his Name so endlessly important.
Context is, also, what made me get all riled up about 1965 New York Times Obituary Writer saying “The Naming of Cats” is “a profound insight into the narcissistic world of the feline”. Sure, that’s part of it. But that’s like answering the question “Who is George Floyd” with the answer: Security guard. It’s not Wrong. It’s just missing the context, the importance of this particular Name. That is, the endless combination of v’s, x’s and s’s and c’s across t. George Floyd was a Security guard, sure, but he is so much More.
Context is—for Levity—what makes me chuckle when I called myself a Typing Masturbator (or an Onanistic Onomast). And I hope it made You chuckle, too, Kind Reader, now that You’ve gotten to know me—at least, these 7 Things about me.
Context is what makes i Complex, not Imaginary. Context is what makes a name a Name. Context is what transformed some of that odd-ball list of letter-formations at the top of This into living, stinking, odd-ball People—People you Love (and Nickelback9). Context is what gives us, to quote O.P. one final time, our “ineffable effable/Effanineffable/Deep and inscrutable singular Name”.
In Math-words: i is purposefully, perfectly unsolvable.
Q.E.D.
Appendix
I feel Inadequate not disclosing that one of the section heads wanted to be “Kittens & Katzes” … but fitting in an entire pastrami sandwich into This Thing seemed, well, like a mouthful
I found this fun podcast episode that investigates the etymology of 60 band names (he calls “bandynomology”), including a fun definition of Onomastics via a story about the Etruscan name Ignacius, which later bred, around the same time, the name for cheesy-beany-spicy fried tortilla chips (Nachos) and that awful aryan killing commune (Nazis). A few of my favorites are:
The Ramones took their name from an alleged fake name Paul McCartney gave at hotels: Paul Ramone
When Jack met Meg, he noticed her predilection for peppermint candies and Meg’s last name being, White, they decided to call themselves The White Stripes
Vampire Weekend got theirs from a film Ezra Koenig worked on while they were still forming the band (because I’m a VW Stan, I already knew this, obviously)
Stan is a term for a super-fan, derived from Eminem’s song about a fanatic called “Stan”
Some of my friends keep a list of band names; one of my favorites, apropos to this Thing, is Eliot Played the Queen
The American Name Society publishes the scientific journal Names and the annual Name of the Year Winners. Here’s the announcement of the 2021 Winners; and the publication including a full summary of the 2020 selection
“You go, Glen Coco” is a line from the 2004 hilarious high school dramedy Mean Girls
Insecure Author feels obliged to point out the misspelling of “Brittney” (instead of, correctly, Britney) here and the poor grammar in the phrase “given the right control her estate” were all thanks to the Name-Nerds. For a group so obsessed with Names, You’d think they’d spell one of the 7 most meaningful names of the year correctly, wouldn’t you, Kind Reader?
"The Naming of Cats", which is about Cats (specifically, how they get their Name), is the introductory poem to Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which is what Cats is about.
The 1965 New York Times obituary on T.S. Eliot
If not for better judgment, this outburst at 1965 New York Times Obituary Writer feels like it could be taken to the extremes of a Tim Robinson sketch. Another time, perhaps…
Obviously I wasn’t gonna write a Thing about Cats without including a reference to The Cat Game from 2001’s brilliantly dumb Super Troopers, what are You, Crazy? (No, You are Kind Reader)
A Spoonerism is the “mistaken” swapping of vowels or consonants from one word to another, e.g. Sammy J birthing Jammy Say (an origin story for another time), leading this Onanistic Onomast to refer to himself as Jam