Quotations

I want to find a voracious, small-minded predator and name it after the IRS. Robert Bakker

If the names are lost the knowledge also disappears - J.C. Fabricius, 1778, Philosophia Entomologica VII,1

The scientific name for an animal that doesn't either run from or fight its enemies is lunch. Michael Friedman

MOST of them accepted namelessness with the perfect indifference with which they had so long accepted and ignored their names. Whales and dolphins, seals and sea otters consented with particular alacrity, sliding into anonymity as into their element. A faction of yaks, however, protested. They said that "yak" sounded right, and that almost everyone who knew they existed called them that. Unlike the ubiquitous creatures such as rats and fleas, who had been called by hundreds or thousands of different names since Babel, the yaks could truly say, they said, that they had a name. They discussed the matter all summer. The councils of elderly females finally agreed that though the name might be useful to others it was so redundant from the yak point of view that they never spoke it themselves and hence might as well dispense with it. After they presented the argument in this light to their bulls, a full consensus was delayed only by the onset of severe early blizzards. Soon after the beginning of the thaw, their agreement was reached and the designation "yak" was returned to the donor. Among the domestic animals, few horses had cared what anybody called them since the failure of Dean Swift's attempt to name them from their own vocabulary. Cattle, sheep, swine, asses, mules, and goats, along with chickens, geese, and turkeys, all agreed enthusiastically to give their names back to the people to whom-as they put it-they belonged.
   
A couple of problems did come up with pets. The cats, of course, steadfastly denied ever having had any name other than those self-given, unspoken, ineffably personal names which, as the poet named Eliot said, they spend long hours daily contemplating although none of the contemplators has ever admitted that what they contemplate is their names and some onlookers have wondered if the object of that meditative gaze might not in fact be the Perfect, or Platonic, Mouse. In any case, it is a moot point now. It was with the dogs, and with some parrots, lovebirds, ravens, and mynahs, that the trouble arose. These verbally talented individuals insisted that their names were important to them, and flatly refused to part with them. But as soon as they understood that the issue was precisely one of individual choice, and that anybody who wanted to be called Rover, or Froufrou, or Polly, or even Birdie in the personal sense, was perfectly free to do so, not one of them had the least objection to parting with the lowercase (or, as regards German creatures, uppercase) generic appellations "poodle," "parrot," "dog," or "bird," and all the Linnaean qualifiers that had trailed along behind them for two hundred years like tin cans tied to a tail. The insects parted with their names in vast clouds and swarms of ephemeral syllables buzzing and stinging and humming and flitting and crawling and tunnelling away.
 
  As for the fish of the sea, their names dispersed from them in silence throughout the oceans like faint, dark blurs of cuttlefish ink, and drifted off on the currents without a trace.
 

NONE were left now to unname, and yet how close I felt to them when I saw one of them swim or fly or trot or crawl across my way or over my skin, or stalk me in the night, or go along beside me for a while in the day. They seemed far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier: so close that my fear of them and their fear of me became one same fear. And the attraction that many of us felt, the desire to feel or rub or caress one another's scales or skin or feathers or fur, taste one another's blood or flesh, keep one another warm or that attraction was now all one with the fear, and the hunter could not be told from the hunted, nor the eater from the food.  Ursula K. Le Guin (1985) She Unnames Them. (The New Yorker, 21 January 1985).

Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, 1997

When the spaniards came they had to give everything they saw a name,.  This is the first duty if any explorer - a duty and a privilege.  You must name a thing before you can ....  John Steinbeck, East of Eden,  1952

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something. Richard Feynman

All accumulated information of a species is tied to a scientific name, a name that serves as a link between what has been learned in the past and what we today add to the body of knowledge. Grimaldi and Engel, Evolution of the Insects, 2005

'What's the use of their having names?',  the Gnat said, 'if they won't answer to them? 'No use to them'  said Alice; 'but its useful to the people that name them, I suppose.'  Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass.

What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet. William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), "Romeo and Juliet", Act 2 scene 2

I have a quite new & curious genus of barnacle, which I want to name, & how to invent a name completely puzzles me.   Charles Darwin (letter to Hooker).

"There should be some things we don't name, just so we can sit around all day and wonder what they are." George Carlin 

The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. Lao-Tzu (604 BC - 531 BC), Tao Te Ching

Oh call it by some better name. Thomas Moore (1779-1852)