Musings Names & Places
“ A rose by any other name would smell …”— Bill Shakespeare
~ by Mark Blackwell
I
expect that names are just about the most important concepts that human beings ever came up with. Names are identifiers. Without names we would not be able to talk about much. Once out of pointing range of something, it would take forever to have any sort of conversation about it. And even then, any conversation you could have would necessitate playing some high-level charades.
But there was a time, long ago, when human language was pretty limited. So, the invention of naming things was most likely the catalyst for the evolution of our species. I wonder if the whole shebang got started with having different grunts for different things.
You know, like,“ wah wah” would mean water.“ Ouch” would have been for fire, sharp stickers stuff, and cave-bear attacks. And the first time any new thing would have been encountered probably elicited a sound like“ wow.” If it was a really big new thing, the sound would be“ woooow.” It’ s not hard to recognize the drawbacks of being a bit too vague.
Right from the start, lots of things would have been sharing the same name— probably“ wow.”
I’ m sure that the paucity of vocabulary led to quite a few misunderstandings back in those early days. And I’ m sure that the troglodytes living in one cave would have all agreed how to pronounce the limited words they had. But those people living over in the next valley refused to say“ wow” correctly. And I’ m pretty sure that the difference in dialect resulted in some early skirmishes, maybe even some small wars.
34 Our Brown County • March / April 2025