What's in a name?
Think about the word vagina. I believe that by saying it 128 times each show, night after night, naming my shame, exorcising my secrets, revealing my longing, was how I came back into my self, into my body. By saying it often enough and loud enough in places where it was not supposed to be said, the saying of it became both political and mystical and gave birth to a worldwide movement to end violence against women. The public utterance of a banished word, which represented a buried, neglected, dishonored part of the body, was a door opening, an energy exploding, a story unraveling - Eva Ensler, of ‘The Vagina Monologues’.
Freedom begins with naming things. Humanity itself, is preserved by it.
When we name something - a thought, emotion, phenomena, practice - we acknowledge its existence as separate from everything else; it is an act of conferring dignity and autonomy. Animals become pets when we name them. Emotions are experienced fully and even discharged when given a name. It is how we fundamentally make sense of the world and transform strangeness into familiarity. Every day in the world, we see that shame and guilt begin to melt with the process of naming an action.
Elsewhere, babies are given a first nonbiological marker of individuality when named; couples give each other private nicknames to embellish their intimacy; heck, after all these years, I think my job, on most days, is principally naming things. Things that are felt deeply, subliminally and privately and exist in time and space. But are not - or can seldom be communicated - because there isn’t a name for it.
Thought leaders in every field are mostly paid for naming things others are able to fully or partially experience but unable to name. In the ten years of facilitating workshops, I have been a witness to hundreds of instances where people’s faces light up in myriad ways when we are able to name something that they have been feeling but are yet to capture.
Naming things that are taboo is, at once, an act of revulsion, bravery and disruption. It is far too important a thing to be weighed down or determined by political climate or the fear of being criticised, outcast or disliked. Naming is the first step to striking a thundering blow at the heart of patriarchy. If misogyny is not going to be named, how is it going to be understood or fought?
Language has the capacity to transform our cells, rearrange our learned patterns of behavior and redirect our thinking. Hurricanes in America, for instance, have names to make people more aware of them and how dangerous they can be. What is named is what becomes real.
It communicates to our audience how intimately well versed and fluent we are with a subject or an idea.
When we are unable to name something that we are feeling in a manner that captures its very essence, we feel overwhelmed and not understood. Naming correctly what the other person is feeling is a big part of having good, meaningful conversations. It is the number one skill of being a good speaker.
This isn’t just a question of vocabulary. This is also about how things that are the closest to us and most obvious can be deceptively invisible and terribly easy to ignore.
The way we think is strongly influenced, if not directly impacted, by the languages we speak. If you speak more than one language fluently, you will find that some phenomena that you have a word for in one language have no exact replica in another language. In a country like India, it is easy to see how different languages make people think about and experience the world in different ways.
Words give us power to understand things. There are numerous lists on the internet of words that English lacks.
If you look across different languages, you start to see different words with that capture meanings that English doesn’t, e.g. have you ever thought of a great retort or comeback after an event has happened and wish it had come to you earlier? Happens to me all the time.
The French have a word for it, L’esprit de l’escalier. Another delightful phrase is ‘folie à deux’, which is often used to humorously describe the condition in which two closely associated people who are mentally ill share the same delusional beliefs.
Experiences may not be limited by language; but the expression of these experiences certainly are. Recent coining of words such as petrichor - which is the earthy scent produced when rain falls on dry soil - has given us a shared understanding and appreciation of a phenomena that we otherwise would have had continued to experience but not necessarily be able to express. There is research that suggests language determines even cognition.
Naming allows us to first understand what is going on inside us and then communicate, with conviction and clarity to others. There is a joy that comes when we are understood by others with no loss in transmission. This joy is often a function of whether you have understood what you are feeling yourself without any loss in translation.
Simplification in language may get us speed but its end result in often a loss of depth.
Emotions are just a form of energy, forever seeking expression. It’s also true that we can’t change what we don’t notice. Noticing and naming emotions gives us the chance to take a step back and make choices about what to do with them. It predates action. If we are unlikely to talk about something, taking action tends to become twice as difficult.
A big part of marketing and branding is storytelling and naming. Language as a sense making sensory tool has never been as prevalent as today. A slice of tomato on your pizza is only a vegetable. When that tomato is grown by a disenfranchised farmer in nasik who had to sell his land or is a limited edition import that was cultivated in the succulent vineyards of sicily, your audience begins to feel what it needs to feel for them to act upon that impulse.
The most famous example of this comes from a study conducted by American psychologist, Elizabeth Loftus. A short scene of a car accident was shown to all the people participating in a study. Different groups of people were asked the same questions in different ways. When participants were asked to estimate ‘the speed of the cars when they *hit* each other’, the average answer was 34.0 miles per hour. When another set of participants were asked to ‘estimate the speed of the cars when they *smashed* into each other, the average answer was 40.5 miles.
Given that all other variables in the experiment were climate controlled and standardised, the difference in the estimate is directly attributable to recasting the question by the usage of the word ‘smashing’. While people recorded and stored their memories in broadly the same way, the way we retrieve them can change dramatically depending on how the question is asked.
This study suggest a sort of linguistic heisenberg principle: as soon as you label a concept, you change how people perceive it.
Think about it. What would we be without language? Our entire understanding of the universe is predicated on attributing meaning to sounds that emanate by combining letters of the alphabet in ever different ways. Language is also a conveyor belt. The words we use, the things we name are the primary transmitter of our culture, history and heritage. Every thing we know today has been passed on to us and will in turn be passed on to those who come after us through words.
Words - as the peerless Maya Angelou once admonished the rest of us lesser mortals - are things. They get on the walls. They get in your wallpaper. They get in your rugs, in your upholstery, and your clothes, and finally in to you.
To invoke Eva Ensler one final time “When I was finally able as an adult to sit with my mother and name the specific sexual and physical violence my father had perpetrated on me as a child, it was an impossible moment. It was the naming, the saying of what had actually happened in her presence, that lifted up my twenty-year depression. By remaining silent, I had muted my experience, denied it, pushed it down. This had flattened my entire life. I believe it was the moment of naming that allowed both my mother and me to eventually face our deepest demons and deceptions and become free.
P.S 1 : You are welcome to share it.
P.S 2: Writing this piece proved to be a labour of love. Have edited for brevity. A longer version is available on request.