While I was home for Christmas, my mom, an 8th grade schoolteacher, complained that her kids “didn’t know the names of anything.” They couldn’t identify a cabbage palm from a coconut palm, a mockingbird from a sparrow, was her example. This was part of a larger complaint about her kids not having any natural curiosity, but also for the lack of conversation between adults and children that fosters a question-and-answer type thingy. While knowing the name of a palm tree may not seem like the most important thing in the world, it occurs to me now that it is.

There’s a belief in a lot of cultures that knowing the name of something, of being able to name it, is immensely powerful. OK, I may have actually just seen that Doctor Who episode where they fought witches, but whatever. It sounds like something that’s true. Naming something means you know what it is, and that’s certainly the first step.

The process of assigning words and identities to objects is something my more linguistically minded peeps can speak to; it’s very complicated, you know, how we all started calling a tree a tree. We could have just as easily called a tree a boot, and then where would we be?

I spend an inordinate amount of time in my day combing through words, so maybe I’m more sensitive to the naming process than others, but I think it’s pretty awesome. We’re lucky to have English. We have way more words than we really need, a word for every subtly, every nuance. (See what I did there?)

This is all to say: fight on, natural curiosity. Keep storing those names for me, brain.

Photo CC thesix on Flickr