I’ve been asked why my surname is sometimes written as Schoen but elsewhere (for example, as the author of my short stories) as Schön. My married name is Austrian; where umlauts (those two dots above the “o”) don’t exist in other languages, "ö" becomes "oe". It causes a lot of confusion, and my family and British friends can’t pronounce my name; my mum says, “scone”, which is a shame, as "Schön" means nice, pretty or beautiful in German, and not a British pastry.
By the time we’ve reached midlife, we’ve done a fair bit of naming: pets (if you're into furry companions), perhaps a business (if you’ve had your own), babies (if you’ve had those) and nicknames for yourself, friends or others. By others, I mean those names we keep to ourselves or restrict to a small exclusive group; I once worked for a company where my colleagues used “FL” to refer to our unhinged and sadistic boss – I coined the term, too. Still, their ironic definition of “Fearless Leader” didn’t come close to what the acronym represented for me – I’ll give you a clue: the “F” is a naughty word and the “L” rhymes with “user”! I was young and immature then 😉.
Names can turn out well and be fitting. When you name your baby, friends say, “Ooh yes, she looks like an Apple-Pear-Blossom.” Sometimes they say, “What sort of name is that?” The latter often don’t remain our friends. Some names create problems; I wanted to call my son “Rafael”. I really like the name, but I don’t pronounce my “r” with the intensity Austrians do, so everyone understands “Afael”, which is close to “Affe” and means “ape” in German. Thankfully, someone pointed this out to me before his birth, and he has a name with no “r”. When naming companies, some keep it conservative and others, like Rosie Made a Thing, choose something catchy that suits the products and brand. I nearly named a website for my humorous fiction stories, “Claire’s Crack”. I was referring to cracking a joke – surely that was obvious 😏. "Erm, you might attract the wrong sort to the site," a friend told me gently whilst giggling.
A name is a label, whether for a person or a thing. We also use them for experiences: if something works out well, we’ll call it, “a success”, and if it doesn’t, “a failure”. This black-and-white approach, which many adopt automatically, can be damaging. I’m not a promoter of seeing everything positively – it gets exhausting and isn’t realistic. However, I believe we can gain something from every experience, even if it might be never to go through it again. I’ve had jobs with mean bosses but lovely colleagues, who I’ve remained friends with, so I don’t refer to them as my worst jobs. I could have done without some of my relationships in the past, but I now refer to them as stepping stones to getting married to a good one, rather than ‘Mistake – BIG mistake”. When I muck up, I try to take Einstein’s view (because we obviously have a lot in common 😊):
“Failure is success in progress.”
Naming or labelling something or someone results in a quick and easy connection in our minds which we then carry around with us. I maintain that my old boss deserved the silent name I gave him, but whenever I used it, albeit in my mind, it made me angry. I wasn’t happy working for him, but I wasn’t doing anything about changing that, so, who was the “FL” really? Going down this path can be a dangerous spiral. As Toni Morrison, the American writer, once said:
“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.”
Now, life without names would be confusing and frustrating; I need to call that place we go to pass water a toilet and not have to describe it (using more labels to do so) each time I desperately search for one while out for the day. However, we could all ask ourselves if naming some people, things or experiences the way we do is causing us more harm than good.
Create the associations in your mind that work for you and make you feel good, or the best you can aim for under the circumstances. You get to decide, like I chose not to go ahead with:
