What's in a Name?

Hello and thanks for reading my second blog entry. I have been meaning to start blogging for some time, and won a ‘reader’s guest blog entry comp’ at  http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/life/blogs/citykat/take-it-from-a-36yo-married-father-of-four-with-a-great-sex-life-monogamy-is-underrated-20120719-22bp8.html  on Friday so I figured this is a good time for me to start.

“The first thing you’ll need is a name. Once you have a name, you’ll know what kind of [blog] band you have.”

Looking over blogging sites and bloggers, the thing that really struck me, and this is true of the wider internet and social media areas I guess, is how many people have appropriated (stolen) an identity that they have, as far as I can tell, no real claim on. Every single historical concept seems to have been stolen by someone on the internet to bolster their own identity. Looking around, every groovy concept in the history of the world, from the Muppets to Orwell to Thompson to The Red Hot Chilli Peppers to Dali to Zeppelin to Dylan has been taken by someone who, at least at first glance, has no legitimate reason to claim this as their identity.

“Well, I was thinking Marc, because that’s my name”

Coming up with a name is a very difficult thing to do. Really, what’s in a name? Does a name have to display an identity of some kind? My offline name is Michael. This doesn’t display identity because there are many Michaels out there, and it’d be fair to say that we’d cover the spectrum of personalities, religions, beliefs and so on.

So why does an online name seem to have a greater need to import an identity?

“Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?”

I was recently surrounded by a group of people (who ought to have known better) waxing lyrical about how this statement means names have no meaning. Of course, Shakes was saying the opposite, but it made me ponder it for a minute. Does a name matter outside of a love/hate ‘my greatest love comes from my greatest hate’  type scenario? Psychologists and philosophers have thought so for some time. 

In grade eight English, I was a constant B+ student who sat beside a constant A+ student.  One day I made the claim that I was better than he was, and his marks were because he was a brown-noser. We ended up having a wager on the point, which I won: we swapped papers and the paper with his name on it got the A+ and the paper with my name on it got the B+, even though they were not written by the so named person.
So a name may have value in it in a subjective sense, but what about in an objective sense. My mother, a teacher of many decades, swears black and blue that you can tell a ratbag by a name. She states that children will be ratbags if they have names like Zack, Hayden, Jordan, Jacob and more (sorry, it is an extensive list, but I can’t remember more). 

But this may still be a subjective point about propensity to assign these names to a new born. Alternatively, it may be that my mother is biased against these types of names and overlooks a counter-example when she comes across one. I don’t know.

Broader studies have perhaps proved this in different and wider terms. Certainly studies have shown that people do have a natural bias toward their own, or at least the more dominant paradigm, and this is displayed through names.

Studies have shown that teachers will grade papers considerably higher when they are purportedly written by a David or a Jennifer than by a Boris or an Olga (Name Stereotypes and Teachers’ Expectations, (Harari, Herbert and McDavid, John W. Journal of Educational Psychology, 65, 1973) and certainly works in philosophy and moral psychology in the Trolley Dilemma and the Kill Whitey experiments interestingly prove this point (incidentally, - shameless plug warning - wait around for the publication of my third book later on this year which deals with some of these fun little philosophical experiments) . 

So I have chosen the name ‘Espressed Life’. It may resemble a book that I don’t overly like anymore, a book that is way too naive and muddy due to it trying to say too much and be pompous. However, from what I understand, it’s my name. I wrote it and quit happily lay claim to it to use in my future (hopefully) humorous and insightful ramblings about whatever takes my fancy on a given day.