Naming Things

If you are a computer scientist, you may believe that naming things is a hard thing, but I, for one, believe it's one of the best parts about owning things. Much like a computer scientist who didn't get the memo about how hard it is, I have invented a set of rules for the things I name, so that naming things feels both organized and fun—like a game!

Let's play a game right now. Can you guess the rules by which I name my plants? My palm tree is named Paula, and my plumeria is Mary. My Tradescantia zebrina is named Sabrina, and my aloe vera (all thousand of them!) are named Vera.

Did you pick up on the pattern? Houseplants all must have a feminine monikers that somehow reference their species or common names. The only exceptions are my Jamaican cacti Denise and Denisette, who are named in honor of their ancestors' propagator from several decades back. While I usually reach for the lowest-hanging fruit when naming a plant (my Eve's pin bears the uncreative name "Eve"), there are definitely a few outliers that stretch the limits of convention. My Phalaenopsis (which I can just barely keep alive and hasn't bloomed in the four years I've owned it) got called "Billie"...the Orchid. And my lemon tree, through some inventive arranging of letters, is called Melany. Some of my plants still don't have names, even though, by rights, they should be christened after a year in my possession. What girl's name sounds like "Huernia," and how will I ever name that weird fern until I get motivated to try and figure out what it really is? I guess I could just call it "Fern" and be done with it. The nice thing about giving plants the names of girls, is that so many girls' names are names of plants!

Naming of phones, on the other hand, is a trickier matter. Do you name your phones? I never hear people referring to their phones by name, but you have to give them names if you want to be able to differentiate them in the app store and on your home network! My phone-naming system got started when I got my first cell phone, a Motorola StarTAC, and subsequently called it "Stella." It was a nearly mindless choice, but it set me on a path that defines how I name my phones to this day! When I retired Stella, I once again made a mindless choice and named its replacement "Stella 2." I think I stopped naming phones for a while because I don't remember a Stella 4 or 5 even though I went through four other phones between 2005 and 2012, but there was definitely a Stella 3. I think I was amused by the banality of bothering to give each phone a name, while not actually bothering to give it a new name.

But by the time I got my first Android phone, I knew something had to change. It had to have a real name. A unique name! A name that honored the grand tradition of naming my phone "Stella," while also not being "Stella." I decided to stick with the celestial theme and name my phone after a constellation—a constellation that, cleverly, also reflected the phone's type, just as the original Stella had. I named it "Andromeda."  And from then on, the rules were set. I must name my phone after something celestial, and the name must somehow reflect the model or type of phone being named. I forget most of the titles I gave my devices after Andromeda, but I do remember being pretty proud of naming one Sony Xperia, "XPerseus," and less proud of naming one Google Pixel, "Pyxis " (I had to do some research for that one—it's a tiny constellation that can't be seen from the Northern Hemisphere). My Samsung Galaxy devices are already celestial by virtue of their model names, so I expanded the rules a bit and allowed them to be named after any characters from Greco-Roman mythology even if they don't have a corresponding constellation. So the tablet is called Galatea, and the Z-Flip is called Zephuros. How will I further stretch the rules as I name my future devices? Let's hope we don't have to find out any time soon, because I'm contractually obligated to keep Zephuros for the next three years!

Other goods that tend to last longer than three years also get convention-guided names, albeit with less frequency than my constant array of new plants and phones.

I named my first car "Zoot," (mainly because I wasn't allowed to give that name to a cat), my second car "Korg," and my third and latest car "Moog." Although I never formalized a set of rules for such vehicular appellations, it is clear looking back that my cars must have one-syllable four-letter names.

My bikes, of which I've also named three, get vaguely nature-adjacent names that give a nod (OK, more like an obsequious bow) to their colors: Greenie, Snowflake, and, my new acquisition in just the past month, Midnight—a magnificent steed in matte navy blue.

The only things I name with some regularity but without rules are my pets. Is that too Wild-Wild-West? Should I establish a system? I'd consider it for the sake of consistency, but I also know it would take the adventure out of the final frontier in nomenclature. Sometimes having rules makes naming things feel like a game, but too many rules might make it feel like nothing more than hard thing in computer science.