Postby Perry Lassiter » Fri Sep 21, 2012 10:39 am
Actually, they do, and its on the tip of my tongue. Anything humans study or manufacture has a name. In the shoelace factory, the foreman can't simply point to the machine that attaches them and say, "how are the doo-hickeys coming?" that's a suprisingly good question, Philip, for naming something actually gives a measure of control. Probably the word I employed, "doo-hickey," along with thing-a-ma-bob, gizmo, widget, and the like were coined because of the necessity of being able to communicate about something. Of course, in some societies, ancient and still primitive, people used aliases in public, because to know their real names would give you power over them. That seems to be reviving today as witness some of the monikers on this board, along with aliases on other web sites, especially twitter. Also many of us use our middle names or nicknames instead of our first names, which make us often in situations annoying if not confusing. Philip, you may have just raised the whole question of semantics!
pl