Branded Blog

On the way to a wedding up the West Coast this afternoon the Barefoot man (who has variously also been named the Barefoot Mountain Man; the Barefoot Runner; the Barefoot Minister, and – more often – “love”) and I were listening to an audio book by Bill Bryson about the history of private life called  “At Home”.

 Having moved into a monument status rectory in a little English village, he tells us, he was curious about the history of the house and in investigating was confronted with the idea that much of history is actually ordinary people carrying on with their ordinary lives, with short bursts of excitement in between in the form of wars, invasions, and the like. Most of history is actually about  normal people like us “eating, sleeping, having sex and endeavouring to amuse themselves.”

And as fascinating as the idea of  a “history of private life” and the rest of the book are, the phrase really caught me today  was ‘endeavouring to amuse [our]selves’. Don’t you just love the way he uses those 4 words to describe everything we as humans do with our waking hours? It encompasses work, leisure, art, emotion, even philosophising. It is all simply us endeavouring to amuse ourselves. Why he chooses to separate out having sex from this category is quite curious in itself since it seems that so much of our internet space, as it were, and the searches thereof are dedicated to things in this arena, but that is, I think, a topic for another day.

This little phrase in the middle of an afternoon drive reminded me how much I like the naming of things. And by “naming” I don’t mean the restricted notion of formal naming of children or brands or towns or stars, amongst others, I mean an altogether broader arena of how we give memorable, distinctive and interesting if not unique phrases of description to the people and things that we encounter.

So, for example, Phoebe the Fox Terrier has also recently been called Phoebe the Monster dog (when she growls at friends); Phoebe the Flying Dog (when in her old age she went on an aeroplane for the first time last December); and more recently Frog. Quite how that one evolved even I am not sure, but there it is.

I guess descriptive naming is the origin of all naming really – Jacobsen, as you may be able to guess, is a derivative of “Jacob’s Son” despite the Nordic “e” which I’m sure has it’s own unique story.

And the “Jacob’s Son” and “Carpenter” and “Von Helsing” origin and craftsman type names would have been amplified by the kind of nicknaming that accompanies getting to know someone – “Dances with Wolves” being a case in point.

I’m told by the Barefoot Guru (yes, the same one) that this is also more how African naming works. As Westerners we want to get someones name “right” so we ask what they prefer to be called. African tradition allows for someone to have different names, depending on who they speak to. You name someone as you see or experience them, not necessarily as they were named at birth – much more like nick-naming in a Western context. You name them as you know them, and they then, in turn, understand how you see them.

I am a great nick-namer, for whatever reason. I love to give and evolve nick-names for people I know. The Girl who Really Really Loves Flowers (who some of you might recall from earlier blogs about, well, flowers) has recently evolved into the Flower Fairy for no good reason except she is such a lovely friend she must be a fairy. And the Much Younger (and Much Taller) baby brother (who inherited all the tall, blonde, blue-eyedness of our distant Nordic genes) is universally known to all who know me as “The Brat”.

Now there probably is a good argument to made for the youngest and only son to be a traditional brat, but his nickname actually has a different origin. It started life out as “Brat Pack” referring to the group of 80’s cult actors surrounding Emilio Estevez and movies like “St Elmo’s Fire”, and also referring back to Humphrey Bogart’s Rat Pack from the 50’s. All epitomising the young, up & coming, suave, well-dressed and good-looking kids that the Brat seemed to evoke somehow for me.  He did, after all, usually take longer to get ready to go somewhere than I did. Still does. But anyway, the point is that the naming of things and people matters at some level. It helps us know them a little better. It helps us love them out loud.

 In December we had a bit of a family gathering and somewhere along the line (probably while we were all waiting for him to get ready so we could go out) the Brat lost his phone somewhere in the house. Eventually I offered to phone it so we could track its ringtone which we duly did, unearthing it from beneath a pile of papers and magazines on the dining-room table. I got to it first and in picking it up and ending the search-call, I noticed the name that he has obviously saved into his phone as my number. It didn’t say my full name, it started with the “Ann” that is often used in my family when referring to me, and then had a dash and then two little words that literally made me stop in wonder.

It said “Ann – the wise”.

Two little words that were quite possibly put there in jest, or irony, but which nevertheless made me feel more loved and appreciated than anything else I could think of.

Naming can tell you so much that you didn’t know before.

Sometimes naming can mean much more than just the describing of things – sometimes, it can mean everything.