Sometime about 50 or so years ago, I read Jacques Barzun's "Science: The Glorious Entertainment." He was a historian, not a professional scientist, but he had a good brain, excellent articulation of ideas and like all historians, he knew criticism inside and out.
It intrigued Barzun that the word "plastic" meant pliable or flexible in his day, but also came to refer to objects made of what we now call plastic and those objects were rigid and inflexible. So, he pointed out, "plastic" means flexible and its opposite. That discussion included observations that humans need names for everything. We can get along with pronouns for a while, referring to "that" or "that thing" or "what he said" but in short order, we want names.
Human life is shot through with speech and writing and much of that depends on having names for things, names that we know and can use. I just read today about naming and renaming the genes that humans carry. We have more than 20,000 of them and they are important. Same with chemicals.
Humans have found or made 50 million different chemicals here on Earth, the vast majority over the last few decades. At least, that's how many unique chemicals are now registered in a database maintained by the American Chemical Society as of yesterday.Sep 9, 2009
Humans Have Made, Found or Used Over 50 Million Unique ...
If you take a look at the book "Positioning" by Reis and Trout, a book about marketing, you can see that value of having a unique name, one that is easy to say, to spell, to remember. Don't pick the name John Smith for your baby boy since there are 44, 935 others just in the US who bear that name. See, it is not unique. On the other hand, don't name the little boy "Sue", either.
Those social security numbers are fairly easy to handle and they are unique but they are considered the epitome of impersonal databases.
In this day of search engines like Duckduckgo and Bing and Google, you really get off the track if you get the first letter of a name wrong. So, I am not naming my boy ?arry or 'arry either.
