Re: [sudo-discuss] Power: nyms, part 1: improper nouns.

Aestetix & Yo's- Names are nouns, but I puzzle over the term "proper noun," because a name is an arbitrary character-string that only appears noun-like because we say so. A "proper" type of noun should be one with some degree of linguistic meaning, for example through etymology ("bike" is a contraction of "bicycle", that has "two things that rotate", from which we also derive "motorcycle" that is also colloquially a "bike"), and names should be "improper nouns" because they don't follow that rule. The linguistic meaning of "given names" is limited, though perhaps sufficient for their historic purposes. Conventionally they convey gender, which is only useful in remotely assessing whether someone is a potential sex-partner. By geographic origin they often convey ethnicity, though this is starting to break down through cultural mixing (most of us are mutts, with two or more ethnicities in our families). Sometimes they convey religion, usually by inference from geographic origin or resemblance to historic names identified with specific religions. At one time they conveyed occupation, as with "Baker" and "Smith," though thankfully we have overcome mandatory hereditary assignment of jobs. There was a time when we could infer, for example, that "John Smith" was almost certainly male, probably Christian ("John" as Biblical name), and probably an ironworker ("blacksmith"). Bluntly put, this would tell you whether John Smith was someone you could mate with, someone with whom that mating would be approved by your own church, and where he stood in the socio-economic hierarchy. The use of "Miss" and "Mrs." for women ("Miss Jane Smith") further emphasized that in a patriarchial culture, males had a prerogative of ascertaining the eligibility of females as mating partners. Today all we can be reasonably sure of is that John Smith is male. He might be a Buddhist or an atheist by his own choice, and he probably works at a desk rather than a forge, and his ethnicity might be a combination of English, French, Kenyan, and Chinese for all we know. Some day perhaps we'll have to guess at John Smith's gender. That would be progress. -G. On 13-05-03-Fri 11:30 PM, aestetix wrote: