"What's in a Name?"

A Story by Melissa Morello

I find it incredible the way we find it necessary to live up to certain standards, just because someone else made them seem necessary. Now, I know what you're thinking... but I'm not some hipster who is going to preach about being different and standing out and all that jazz. Being different is no concern of mine. I am targeting a much more specific pattern of thinking, which is programmed into all of us, myself included! We all think a certain way based on "fundamentals" which predate us and most of our traceable ancestors.

What am I talking about? I am talking about, quite literally, the way we think. It is human nature to rationalize things and to try to be logical. I know I am being very vague, so I am going to narrow it down to the most basic idea I can think of.

1+1=2

You know it, and I know it. All the equation above represents, is when you have one something and group it together with one other something, you have two somethings. This is common knowledge, but do we really need to have a statement consisting of numbers and symbols to tell us that we now have more than one item? Yes we do. It makes us feel better to think we know something solid and concrete. It makes the world go round. But what is so concrete about it?

One is a number, just a word. A grouping of letters; of symbols. A single-syllable sound. This is a word that someone, somewhere created. Going back ALL THE WAY TO THE BEGINNING OF LANGUAGES, (yes, I'm really going there), "one" is just a sound that someone assigned a specific meaning to. This may have been unintentional, but somewhere along the line, it developed into a word with a meaning.

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." - The immortal line from William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, I am not going to convince you that the two "star-crossed lovers" would have done better with different last names, but the statement is still true. Whether we call it a rose or an elbow, it is still a sweet-smelling flower. So the next time some one says "that isn't right," or "don't say that," just think, why? Just because one person thinks something, does not mean you must hold the same value.

What is my point? I'm getting there, I promise.

Although sometimes, it seems difficult to venture from the norm and what people say is the right way to think, speak, or act, just think take a minute to really think about it. I am not saying that math equations are useless and that numbers have no meaning. I am just using this basic knowledge to prove a point that these are just words; sounds that are intangible and only hold the meaning that we assign to them. Numbers do not grow from the ground, nor fall from the sky. Numerical value is a concept that mankind established to make our lives easier, and to put a logical understanding to our ways of life. We have three oranges or we have a few oranges, either way we know what we have and the way we understand it is a matter of our own human comprehension.

I know I didn't have to go into this long discussion about the origins of our language and Shakespeare, of all things, to basically say that it doesn't matter what other people think, but I generally find that when you bring it back down to the basics, things just make a lot more sense.