On Naming

I hope Mr. Howe isn't mad that I posted this here. I stumbled upon this excellent post from his facebook. I am a self-proclaimed student of etymology and history, myth and folklore. As such, this was very interesting to me. It sums up my own feelings on the matter of naming. There is a power in a name that no man should take lightly. In ancient cultures a name could undo a man or an object, or venerate it. That said, I leave the floor to Mr. Howe:

I’m no man of the sea, rather (to steal a line from famous French maritime photographer Philippe Plisson) a man of the edge of the sea.

“Wave” is an old word, certainly as old as man’s standing on the shore watching them crash on the beach. I enjoy those words that are old in many languages, as if their venerability somehow augmented and enriched the substance of their meaning, as if a lengthy etymology comprised some sort of pedigree. (Of course, it’s puerile to measure the age of man against the age of the Earth, given the relative brevity of human existence, but the naming of things is such an important mythological act that it’s not to be taken lightly, as if there was somehow the possibility of taking the measure, as it were, of the things long contemplated but whose very nature cannot be touched by man. Moreover, it all harks back to the myth of a proto-tongue common to all humans, as if the first naming of things was shared by humanity as a whole, an ancestral language that has more to do with an unavowed yearning for Eden lost than mitochondria and behavioral modernity.)