What's in a name
Deferring to Shakespeare
After all the use of that famous question out of Romeo and Juliet as a blog title gives Shakespeare the lead. A name is given to you at birth and it sticks, works beyond death and enlists you in the collective doings of all those with the same name. Meaning Romeo and Juliet will only be able to come together in death, the feud between the two names precluding any other outcome.
Is a name just a label
At first glance, yes — a utilitarian pointer. But unlike a barcode or QR code, names carry centuries of cultural sediment. A name isn’t neutral; it’s charged — with origin, ethnicity, status, gender, religion. Labels can liberate or confine. Are we naming or branding? Is your name yours, or is it what others use to fix you in place?
Self as a generic name
There's a haunting universality in the name "self" or "I" — everyone has one, yet it’s completely private. When you say “my name is…” you are declaring a boundary, drawing a circle around yourself. What if the self itself is a placeholder, a name-in-waiting, forever half-described?
What is your name
One of the first questions we ask strangers — but why? Is it about trust, memory, hierarchy? In some cultures, knowing someone’s “real name” is intimate or even dangerous. Names can be keys, incantations, weapons, or gifts. There’s something oddly powerful about naming — as if once named, a thing becomes real.
Can you change your name
You can indeed — legally, socially, symbolically — but does it work? The act of renaming is often one of rebirth or resistance: slaves renamed themselves, colonizers imposed names, trans people reclaim identity, artists take pseudonyms. Changing your name can be an act of autonomy — or of erasure. But even when changed, names echo.
Your name as a verb
You are what you do. Can a name then be static or does it change and adapt to what you are doing? Changing the name from being a static noun to a dynamic verb makes your name into a story of development, reflecting progress and demise. Saying a name tells a story, your story.
A name is a token
A name is never just a personal thing — the moment it's entered into a registry, it becomes a credential, a unit of legibility in the eyes of the state, the bank, the hospital, the school. Bureaucracy doesn't care who you are — it cares what you're called, how you're indexed, what identifiers you're tied to.
With your name in a registry you become known. To be known means to be managed.
But the token is brittle, just a string of characters, symbols with a high chance of being misspelled, mispronounced. It opens your existence to being accused of misrepresentation, the token identifying you further, denoting gender for instance which is currently a concept in flux. The name gives you representation of your personhood as seen by the bureaucrazy as long as the bureaucrazy can be convinced of that fact. If not then losing your representation will mark you as deplorable, unwanted, deportable.
Disclaimer
This text was created in a dialogue with ChatGPT. Only a handful of sentences were taken over as given by the AI, I see this blog post still as product for which I claim the copyright.
The drill down
I knew this would be a rabbit hole after I asked my sister about a book I purchased after a long search which was mentioning my great grandfather as the captain of one of the expeditions of Hans Hass, the deep sea diver. Maybe we'll find a bit more information in the near future if we keep on digging. Going down the rabbit hole and throwing the information to ChatGPT (or any other AI chatbot) provoked some good info from the chat bot. I give you only the prompts, use at your own risk
Prompts:
Maybe it's too much but what do you have on the etymology of the name Thie?
My great grandfather was a rather wealthy Captain of a schooner last seen setting sail for a sailing race in Australia way back in the 1900
At some point my great grandfather authored a book together with Hans Hass, a famous deep se diver