Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Of Naming

I'll start posting my most relevant thoughts first to get them off the way for once.

Recently I've been paying a lot of attention to the necessity and importance of us humans to name every single thing we ever met or known. It's quite easy to spot this, really. From a extremely logical scientific study to an intuitive learning, you can always see how people value naming. It's vital for us to name things as a mean to develop our own perception of the world.
And, indeed, the moment you recognize something, a name for it is already born. There are things everybody knows, like catharsis, but not everybody knows it by that name. Some think of it like "That Thing I Feel When Luke Skywalker And Darth Vader Fight", for example. The name "I Have To Develop This Paragraph Further" was just born as well. And then another one was born "No, There's No Need, Just Connect The Next Paragraph With This One With Another One In-between".

The thing with names is that they are supposed to be shortcuts to ideas and concepts. Like what you just saw, there's no point in being a name when every detail is present in it. Like bringing your whole company building when you can just show your card. Names are every form of symbolism and representations of one bigger thing. Maybe that's why we tend to make generalizations, because naming is also a tool for simplifying things as a way to deal more efficiently with them.

Names allow me to make everything more tangible, and when you have control of the thing you tamed by naming it, you have access to areas beyond it. Names are steps on which I can walk deeper into the unknown, into the Unthought, and map things out.
No wonder one day just I started noticing how giving my thoughts names was exactly the core of what turned my process of thinking a thousand times more efficient. Well, this is all too obvious, yeah I know, but sometimes our minds do not spend enough time thinking of Things That Are Obvious, because... yeah, ok, I'm getting into that paradoxal thing again. Alright, my point is, sometimes a concept has to grow on you, right? You have to fully recognize and realize things by yourself, despite how obvious they may seem. And then names will actually be fully meaningful. The name comes after the realization, after all.

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