When I was a student, back in the early ’80s, among the staples of our mixed tapes would be a song or two by moustachioed singer-songwriter Jim Croce — he of ‘Mad, Bad, Leroy Brown’ and funereal weepy ‘Time in a Bottle’ fame. Although it rapidly became deeply uncool to like Jim as New Wave swept all before it, I rather liked his songs because they had simple lyrics that made a bit of sense.

The one that triggered this memory was ‘I Got a Name’.

Like the pine trees lining the winding road
I’ve got a name, I’ve got a name
Like the singing bird and the croaking toad
I’ve got a name, I’ve got a name

And I carry it with me like my daddy did
But I’m livin’ the dream
That he kept hid

So far, so hippie. But what I really find quite irksome is the naming of inanimate, everyday objects. I’m not claiming to be rational here — it’s just one of those little mental burrs that causes minor irritation and a wish to scour the braincells with wire wool. For example, I once had a weird job which involved living above the garage of a small house in the Welsh countryside while I edited a book for an eccentric choreographer suffering from Epstein-Barr. I’ll tell you all about it sometime.

For now, though, I offer you a brief dialogue which transpired shortly after my arrival.

She: Would you be a dear and make me a cup of tea?
Me: Certainly. Where might I find the milk?
She: It’s in Hieronymous.
Me: <???>
She (tittering): Hieronymous! The fridge! After Hieronymous Bosch! Because it’s a Bosch!

See what she did there?

She also had a name for her Ford Fiesta which lies buried in my subconscious under layers of trauma scarring, and probably one for her toaster — assuming it wasn’t a Smeg, that is.

Of course, naming things is something very ancient and significant. The Bible would have it that Adam was tasked with giving various animals their monikers, which essentially differentiated them and gave them meaning (and gave Adam dominion over them, of course).

Genesis 2:19-20: And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
20 And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field . . .

This narrative underlies one of my favourite anti-war poems: ‘The Naming of Parts‘, by Henry Reed. In his version, a weapons instructor takes his recruits through the basics of a rifle, naming each part, while an instructee compares this ritual to the vivid natural beauty of springtime.

Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
Today we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighbouring gardens,
And today we have naming of parts.

It’s not without reason that writers will talk about a ‘nameless fear’ when evoking the deepest, most primitive terror — if it has no name, how can we understand and defeat it? So too the idea that in order to do evil, by way of dark magic, one must know the name of one’s potential victim. Giving up your name makes you vulnerable. In a more concrete domain, the military practice of assigning codenames to things or activities that must remain secret is rather sensible.

Yet of course, as Shakespeare’s Juliet contends, “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” — the word one chooses as a label for a person or thing is in itself unrelated to the essence of that thing’s being. Practitioners of the black magic of linguistics will recognise this as the gulf between signifier and signified.

But perhaps the one that strikes deeply into my most churlish place, bypassing any vestigial charitable impulses and overstretching all twanging fibres of tolerance, is the naming of bicycles. This seems just as vapid and twee as christening your fridge or dubbing your dishwasher — they are inanimate objects, much as you may appreciate their positive impacts on your life.

Yet such is many cyclists’ fondness for their mount — and it is, after all, quite an intimate connection, when you think about it — that the naming of the bike is a frequent, regrettable phenomenon. It’s not going to come if you call it; it’s not going to go faster if you invoke its moniker.

This particular runaway train of thought was instigated by a book I have been reading, in which a young Englishman undertakes a particularly long, hazardous, and some would say pointless, bicycle trip aboard a machine he has named after a middling ’90s pop star. Sometimes he refers to his bike by this name, but more often he seems to forget for a few hundred pages. I’m not sure why he bothered.

By far the most common bicycle appellation appears to be a rather literary one: Rocinante, after Don Quixote’s ramshackle horse. It’s easy to see the appeal: Rocinante is like Quixote himself — old, cranky, and inadequate to tackle the mission they are on. And, you know, riding a bike is vaguely like riding a horse, and all your journeys pursue abstract and impractical ideals of chivalric service, inspired by too much romantic literature.

In short, it’s the equivalent of saying, “I’m a bit mad, me!”

That’s my jaded and misanthropic take, anyway. The one person who is exempt from this narrow-minded judgemental view is the great Dervla Murphy, and that’s because she writes such a ripping good yarn about pedalling her Rocinante from Ireland to India in 1963 — and about subsequent adventures too. And because she was brave, single-minded, and unafraid to speak her mind.

Of course, we do have a long history of naming other means of transport, particularly ships. It was once considered bad luck to change the name of your ship, which is why my sister and I stuck with the rather prosaic ‘Bluebird’ when we acquired our ancient marine-ply Optimist dinghy in the ’70s.

And if you have to have a name for one of these things, perhaps it’s right that it should be bestowed by someone with a modicum of authority. Consider the case of Britain’s Natural Environment Research Council, which spent $287 million on a new ship to explore polar waters. Innovatively, they sought to crowd-source the vessel’s name, with the result that the public overwhelmingly voted for ‘Boaty McBoatface.’

In the end, a compromise was reached when the ship was christened Sir David Attenborough, and Boaty McBoatface was appended to one of its autonomous submersible robots. And if you’d like to read about similar naming-poll shenanigans, google Oldham Council’s programme of naming their road-gritting trucks.

If handing out names bestows power on both giver and receiver and acts as a stay against confusion and chaos, then have at it, I say. It’s just that what you name may be as significant (or insignificant) as the name you give it, and perhaps some of our interactions would be happier remaining anonymous.