Naming

Something that I found interesting in class discussion yesterday was our constant need to name things and organize them into group after group after group. This is something that I feel has come up in all of the works we have read and I am ashamed to admit, something I never thought of before. As a little girl, I was incredibly fond of renaming all my Barbies with each outfit change and the different names my sister and I would come up with for ourselves when playing "pretend". As I got older, I would rename all my friends with nicknames and the places we would go. I never thought of this constant need to name things, know the meaning and the origin of the word as a bad thing. In our class discussion about naming animals, I thought of something though that sort of put it in place for me. In a Christian or Jewish standpoint, God gave the naming work to humans; it was a right and something He only gave to them. For those that don't know, God creates land animals and man (Adam) on the sixth day. Genesis 2:18-21 states that God brought the animals to Adam and whatever he named them would forever be there name. Right here, man has the privilege to name any and every animal what he desires. Even if our Hebrew schools and Sunday schools did not directly teach us that it is man that can name everything, we are taught Genesis over and over as children. The stories are ingrained in our heads and I certainly remember learning over and over that Adam got to name all the animals. This could certainly be one of the reasons subconsciously that we feel this right to name everything around us and especially that which is "below" us. Like Schwartz said, we never name our parents and yet they name us whatever they feel like. We name our dogs, but maybe they are thinking, "ugh really? Thats all ya got?" Very interesting this naming business.