nao-name
I'm going to get a bit philosophical. Researching today's topic dropped me through an ice sheet I hadn't realize was thin and things went a bit deep. I still think its worth writing though, so here we go.
In the beginning of all things, God said “let there Be”, named a thing and it was. From His words all life and everything that would spin outward from that came into existence. One of the first things He told His newly created humans to do was to name all the life they found living around them.
Whether you take it as myth, metaphor or fact, I think its telling that the people writing down that specific creation story considered naming a thing enough to bring it into existence. There is something buried deep inside humanity that considers being able to True Name a thing powerful. Controlling. Summoning. From the beginning of the world to Rumpelstiltskin's fairy tale to modern urban fantasy where a hero has to learn the demon's name to banish it, humanity is fascinated with the power naming something imparts. We name our pets, our cars, give our friends nicknames and, sometimes, we even rename ourselves.
Take a mental trip backward with me. Let’s go to the very beginning of language. Once upon a time, there were - well, perhaps not humans, perhaps not yet, but there were people. There were people who had learned to articulate sounds into the vastness of the wilderness. Sounds that didn’t just warn of danger or rejoice over finding fresh water or call the group together. Sounds that, sung and trilled and coughed and grunted from mouth to mouth, had started to share ideas that went beyond survival, sounds that needed to grow in complexity to match the minds they were coming from. It wasn’t enough to say “the cave is safe” anymore. It became “the cave is dry” and then, perhaps, “the cave will fit all of us” and then, in time “the cave is home”. And eventually it wasn’t ‘the cave’ anymore; it was ‘home’.
'Let’s go home.'
And ‘home’ meant something different than simply ‘the cave’ even though it was the cave that was being referred to when home was mentioned. Words, perhaps for the first time, had caught an emotion and turned it into a solid thing. Home. Something you only felt to start but that you had made solid when you had called a specific place that word. In a way, you had taken what wasn’t known and had made it real simply by giving it a name. Now, when you said ‘home’ everyone in the group knew what you meant and felt what that meaning was in their own hearts. That was power, enclosing something hereto unknown in the shell of a word, where it could now be understood and passed from person to person, mouth to mouth. Tamed and given a place in the framework of daily life.
These people, creating language, must have felt that power, that awe, each time a new name was given to something, bringing it into their collective conscious, sharing what it was, binding the unknown into the known with the magic of a spoken word, the new tumble of sounds. Making it safe and also real for all of them. Snatching it from the dangerous world around them and turning it into something they could hold with their tongues and contain with their mouths. The spoken words were acts of creation and definition.
‘That cluster of stars is The Snake.’
‘In the summer, we will go to the Red Caves and paint your hand on the wall to lay next to mine.’
‘The creature that killed your son is called Bear.’
Because, yes, sometimes, naming a thing tames it.
Sometimes, though, naming a thing just gives your fear a face.
And so, whoever they were, these first people, still learning to name things, they also developed what modern linguistics call ‘noa-names’. Because if names had the power to create a thing, you had to be very careful what you spoke into existence. It was too dangerous to say the name ‘Bear’ because a bear might be nearby and feel the power of his name calling to him. To say a thing was to call it up in everyone’s mind and how far was that from calling it up in reality? So you didn’t say ‘bear’.
You said ‘brown’.
And everyone knew what you really meant but you hadn’t said the word itself. You hadn’t spoken the power of the word. You’d slid around it sideways, created the image in everyone’s mind but not let the sounds out into the air where anyone - anything - might hear them and decide to answer. (There’s a more in-depth post that floats around tumblr about the word ‘bear’ but I can’t find it at the moment). The point was, people learned to say things without saying them because, at the core and heart of who we are, we know that the sounds that leave our mouths mean something.
It wasn’t a bear. It was a brown.
It wasn’t a wolf. It was a stranger.
It wasn’t an elf or fairy. It was the ‘Fair Folk’ or the ‘Good Neighbors’.
It wasn’t Satan. It was ‘Old Scratch’ or ‘The Gentleman in Black’. (In the case of Blues songs like “The Devil’s a Busy Man”, the ‘devil’ mentioned is a nao-name itself, used for very real and immediate reasons.)
It’s not Macbeth. It’s ‘the Scottish play’.
It's not death. It's 'taking the bus' and 'passing away'.
'Stick and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me' we teach our children - but we all know its a coping technique, not the truth. We all know, somewhere at the beginning of us, that words, written or spoken, carry weight beyond a simple sound. More languages than history can remember have echoed in this world's past, creating and calling down through time. It's become so common that we've grown careless about it, forgetting the magic of being able to name a thing, the power it invokes with each written or spoken syllable. Modern day media spin doctors ply their trade like snake oil sellers of the past, influencing the masses who don't even think about what the words they're accepting as true are creating out of reality.
So, today, just for a little while, why don't we all find the sounds that give us the very human magic we all take for granted and take it back, just a little, for ourselves and our world. Let us, once again, create something real and true and warm and kind when we open our mouths and speak to someone. The magic may be old and worn and faded from those first sounds of so long ago - but its still there, if we pay close enough attention.
A gentle word can still, sometimes, at exactly the right moment, in the exact right tone, change a person's life. Why not start today?
Why not start now?
