Are you someone who gives things like your phone or car pet names? You're not alone.
A 2019 study showed that 56 percent of Americans name their cars, with the top three names being Betsy, Betty, and Bessie.
When we give things like cars or other important objects in our life names, we change the way we interact with them, and we may be more likely to appreciate them, says computational linguist Kathryn Hymes.
Kathryn Hymes is a computational linguist and co-founder of Thorny Games. Photo: Supplied/Kathryn Hymes
“Naming is powerful,” Hymes tells Jim Mora.
“When something is named, anything really, it means that you’re marking it as special in some way, you are giving it a particular reference, and that helps you think about it, talk about it, imagine a future with it and also in certain instances to humanise it.”
But there’s little data about how common it is, she says, but we tend to name items that we build complex intimate relationships with.
“When I talk to people, [naming of objects] can be all sorts of things that help them do work or help them become more of themselves.
“For example, maybe it’s mobility or freedom with a car or wheelchair, many people will name their first car … for creativity, musical instruments are so often named. Famously, B.B. King named his guitar Lucille, by doing that you can imagine you’re really elevating these items to be a character in your life.”
Attachment also plays a role in naming objects, she says.
“I think that there is a hunger and longing for people to have more direct and considered relationships with their possessions, as almost a counteract to the endless consumption, the mindless consumption and the constant appetite to buy more and to consume more, that is really promoted by the culture at large.”
Children do it naturally with toys but as adults, we sometimes name powerful machines because it gives us a sense of some control over them, she says.
“It’s a power play, and that doesn’t have to be a negative thing always but there’s a power dynamic when you give something a name because you are framing how you interact with it and how others interact with it and how it is known.
“Certainly, with machines that have the ability to encroach more and more on our lives, I think control may be a desire we all have, be it conscious or subconscious.”
Throughout history, and even going back millennia, humans have named various inanimate things including weapons, ships, houses, and tools, Hymes says.
“But weapons in particular really are a common target for naming and as you say, it is about control also this idea of giving a weapon its own reputation, maybe its own status and legend and this extends to many different parts of the world, there are examples from Māori culture.”
They can end up with human names or with weapons in particular, a name can highlight a unique feature or its strength, she says.
“For example, David Grisman is a musician and he has named his mandolin the Crusher and he talks about Crusher, which is again not a human name, but as you imagine, you wield Crusher the instrument a little bit more like a weapon and you’d interact with it a little differently than if it were named Paul say.”
Honorary Professor at the Institute for Name-Studies Peter McClure, who has looked back at centuries of human-named machines, theorises that the history of using feminine pronouns to refer to ships derives from a male desire to control women.
Hymes agrees that gender is another dynamic at play in naming objects.
“Siri, for example, is often gendered as female, if you think about the popular GPS systems and voices that are typically used, there are tropes around them, and these tropes can be gendered.
“But I think it’s interesting to poke at the notion that often times female names do show up more, certainly in the case of ships in history. I’d be curious to know about gendered weapons and whether or not those end up being more male or female.”
Kathryn Hymes is co-founder of Thorny Games, and a writer whose work on language, technology, and music has appeared in publications like The New York Times.
