Names

It’s my third birthday, and we’re having a party in the courtyard of our apartment building. There is a cake. My parents tell me that it says “Happy Birthday, Karin.”

Karin, I think. That’s my name.

I once told my mother that I remember learning my name on my third birthday. “No,” she said, “That can’t be right. You knew it much earlier than that.”

Of course I did, I thought. That’s why I felt that strong wave of recognition when I heard it, a rush of new understanding. This group of sounds that I’ve been hearing for so long—it refers to me. It isn’t just any word. It is my word, my designated set of sounds and letters.

I suppose my memory wasn’t of learning my name, but of learning what it was to have a name. Out of all the types of words, names most pointedly symbolize the arbitrary nature of language, particularly first names. One of the basic rules of language is that words are meaningful because a community agrees upon a meaning. The choice of the word is arbitrary but customary. Even though the word chair has no inherent connection to the concept or material reality of a chair, and so is arbitrary in that sense, I still can’t just decide to call a chair a rocket ship or an air-chay if I want to be understood.

Names are different. Every person has a name that was given to them at some point, usually at birth, and that everyone else has to use to refer to that person. We can’t even refer to the person until we discover his or her name, so we have to learn new vocabulary every time we meet somebody. Naming children is one of the only opportunities we have for creating our own reference and imposing it upon the rest of the world, rather than accepting the set of words given to us by our language and culture.

Names are also different from other words because they are meant to have a unique referent; names refer to individual people, not types of people (such as doctor or diabetic). Most types of words refer to classes of things. Linguists like to use chair as an example, presumably because there is no inherent quality that makes something a chair other than that people think it is a chair (unlike a cat, which can be identified as a cat based on its DNA). Something is a chair because it shares similar features with other chairs: it has a seat, and usually legs, and perhaps arms, and you can sit on it, and someone built it expressly to be sat upon, and it might be near some other chairs or a table.

Names work the opposite way. I am called Karin, but this does not imply any similarity with other Karins, although we sometimes pretend it does, saying things like, She seems like a Karin.
Even though I may seem like a Karin, that’s not how I got my name. Our parents just choose them, and they are free to pick anything they want. It’s sheer meaningless luck that christens us Karin, or Isabella, or Amber, or Moon Unit. Yet this arbitrary collection of syllables will be unproblematically correlated with our identity, in most cases for the rest of our lives.

Sometimes names are chosen based on a system. In many African countries, names are based on days of the week; my friend Kofi’s name indicates that he was born on a Friday. Even so, when people say Kofi, they are not referring to the category of men born on Fridays. No one says, My friend is a Kofi, or Kofis are such nice people. The name still has a unique reference to whichever Kofi the speaker meant to describe or address.

We use names as though they are unique, although they usually are not. When I say Kofi, I am only referring to one particular person named Kofi, although I am well aware that the name presumably has other referents, at least three that I know of and presumably tens or hundreds of thousands that I don’t.

If you are the frequent illustrator of this blog, Adam Caldwell, then you recognize that there is another artist and art teacher named Adam Caldwell living across the bay from you in San Jose. If you are my coworker, Michelle Gonzales, your files occasionally get scrambled up with those belonging to a student at our school by the same name. And if you are my high school friend Sarah Johnson, then there is someone with the same name as you right within your circle of friends, so that whenever someone says Sarah Johnson, someone else inquires, Which one?

There are many other Karins, but I am the only Karin Spirn in the entire world; at least, all evidence indicates this to be the case. My last name is so unusual that, until recently, I was under the impression that only documented members of my family shared it. This impression stems from a childhood memory. Long before internet research was an option, my grandmother ordered a book that promised to list everyone with our last name in the entire country. I was at her house when the book arrived. She opened it with excitement, only to find that she knew every single person listed in the book. “Oh, there’s Uncle David,” she would say, thumbing through the pages, “and there’s my cousin Florence,” as my aunt and uncle looked over her shoulder and nodded in recognition.

In a prescient effort to make sure that I would be maximally Googlable, my parents added to this rare last name the unconventional spelling of my first name, and, incidentally, an unusually spelled middle name as well.

Growing up, many of my closest friends had unusual last names, so it never seemed odd to me. One of my best friends and I still reminisce about the substitute P.E. teacher who read our names off the role sheet with disdain: “Spirn and Tashker,” he said. “What ever happened to the good old days when everybody was named Smith and Johnson?”

Now when I want to know what my friends with unique names are up to, I can type their names into search engines and generate a list of information pertaining specifically to them. If I want to know what Sarah Johnson—either one of them—is doing, I’m pretty much out of luck.

For those of us with unique (as far as we know) names, the illusion of our name being inherently connected to our identity is complete. I know that the word chair is not inherently connected to the concept or object of a chair, because if I go to France, it will be called a chaise, and if I go to Mexico it will be a silla. But when someone says Karin Spirn, I imagine that this name encompasses my identity and is synonymous with me. I would be highly disconcerted to discover another Karin Spirn, or even a Karen Spirn, out there in the world; she would have stolen my identity.

What would it be like, I wonder, to have the anonymity, or perhaps I should say the omninymity, of Sarah Johnson? I like to imagine that I would be less narcissistic, less convinced of my own uniqueness or specialness. That I would have a greater sense of my fundamental similarity with other people, people who shared not only emotions and experiences with me but even shared, in some linguistic sense, my identity.

It’s hard to say, though—I can’t really envision what it’s like to be anyone other than Karin Spirn.

Thanks to the inimitable Adam Hunter Caldwell for the illustration.