Everything we look at in the world around us has a name. Someone has taken the time to create a name for everything. When we have a new baby, everyone asks, "What's her name?" if I were to buy a boat, someone would ask, "What are you going to name her?" We name our pets, our cars, and some people even name their well, I guess I"ll leave that one alone. My point is, we feel the need to name everything, and I"m not sure I know why.
In his book Going Back to Bisbee, Richard Shelton writes, "If you can't name it, you can't really see it" (p. 33). Shelton says that when we name something, we create it a second time, and this is the power of naming, to create something that was already created. Naming something somehow makes a part of it yours. Shelton seems to know a lot of names for vegetation, landscape monuments, and even towns. Throughout the book, Shelton states that he has made up names for plants and other items based on their appearance. I see and hear this practice on almost a daily basis. Someone will forget the name of an item, and then call it a name that somewhat describes the item. The person they are talking to will know what the item is just from the description. So why did the item need a formal name in the first place? It seems to me that we could just call things what we want to call them, using some descriptive words, and other people will know what we"re talking about. The only drawback I see with this is that if the other person has never seen the item, it would make it very difficult to convey what we were talking about.
Shelton wonders about the people who named birds on pages 135-137 because there are so many unusual bird names. I have heard many names for birds that are strange and a lot of times very humorous. It would seem to me that the names of birds, and many other animals, would be better if they were more descriptive. Who wouldn't know right off what a light brown long winger looked like? Again, the problem with that would be the birds that were similar, but not exactly the same.
