Non-Fiction
Yes, you can leave the hospital without naming your baby / Isaac Yuen
The lesser frigate bird, via Biodiversity Heritage Library
Yes, you can leave the hospital without naming your baby
—up to two weeks before having to file the birth certificate paperwork; unless you live in Germany, where you can have up to three months to find a suitable moniker for the soon-to-be toddler, before the state decides on your beloved’s behalf. Or so I’ve been told. It is indeed good to take time and choose carefully, for some newborns can be one way in the womb and another out in the world. The Emma you highlighted from the big book of names may not match the Bernadette you cradle in your arms. Please forgive their tiny changes-of-heart. It is hard to hear clearly through a bellyful of fluid, so while they might have cooed at Liam while contained, they might bawl up a storm after discharge, unless you can come up with makeshift distractions like calling them Li-HAAM, the yelling of which may usher in a fit of giggly delight, leading to permutations of Hammy or Hamster or even Sir Ham-Ham of Hamalot. Or so I’ve heard.
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Of course you can simply impose your will upon another, stamp your hopes and dreams onto a newly minted thing. This is the easiest and most unfair way to establish a relationship. Celebrities with their outsized egos do this on the regular, turning their hapless offspring into benign market fruit, like APPLE, or brands that mean everything and nothing, like GOOP. Power couples may choose to dedicate their progeny to prototype spyplanes (preceded by Æ, which according to the Musks is the elvish rendition of artificial intelligence) or to syllables of the Semitic abjads (here at least Aleph Portman-Millepied has decent future nickname potential, like Al or Alf or Alfonso Soriano and maybe even The Fonz, but rare is any child suave enough to pull off the latter sobriquets.)
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In the wild reaches, even less care is taken in the naming process. This is more understandable, given that there are so many mushrooms and so many weevils, and every being deserves a mention within life’s grand catalogue. Blurry-eyed taxonomists and phylogeneticists may be too mossy-brained to conjure up yet another description after being tasked to come up with 1.3 million of them, often in both common and Latin scientific. Under such pressure some have resorted to the celebrity method but in reverse, so that the world is now blessed with the beauty of the Kate Winslet beetle, which may never sink beneath the waves, but will yet still go under if its Costa Rican treetop habitats are converted to pasture. Then there is the Bono Joshua Tree trapdoor spider, who has most likely never heard its U2 counterpart sing, but scuttles beneath the famous desert national park, where unpaved streets go unnamed.
If one is truly mired in designation indecision, the default route is to defer to luminaries past or present: Charles Darwin or David Attenborough are fashionable go-tos these days. One could also pay tribute to the simultaneously venerated yet criminally underrated Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt. It is hard to tell whether the nineteenth-century Prussian polymath would derive pleasure from having so many things under heaven named after him, a list that includes not only white-throated penguins and hog-nosed skunks (and of course a mass of squirming Alexes born any given day), but also a productive oceanic current, an entire region on the moon, and throw in a pair of asteroids slinging around the sun why not. Without personally knowing the naturalist it is difficult to say whether Humboldt would be humbled by such label-mad adulation or be exasperated at the lack of imagination used to convey the splendour he saw all around, so succinctly captured in his dying words: Wie herrich, diese Strahlen! Sie scheint die Erde zum Himmel zu rufen! (How rich, these rays! She seems to call the earth to heaven!)
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Perhaps the real shame of nomenclature negligence is that it can lead to the careless assignment of status and value. Is the lesser Kudu, with the same cheese straw-shaped spiral horns of its greater antelope cousin, any less elegant and distinguished? How must the lesser Frigatebird feel while soaring high above the thermals when his red-throated kin are bestowed titles of “Greater” and “Magnificent,” evoking “Christmas” and “Ascension,” only to be itself saddled with a description meaning lower-class, second-rate, a notch-below?
Of course there is the justification of size, which is usually more a justification for laziness. The least weasel is not any less for weighing as much as a small stack of pennies, but rather more vaunted for its prowess in tackling prey ten times its size, delivering surgical bites to baby bunnies to sever their spines just so. The least tern is not diminutive in any other aspect of its life, as the double-ounce ball of fluff is fully outfitted to embark on roundtrip fish-fuelled flights from the American state of Nebraska to the Brazilian state of Ceará. (Here is not the last instance where a nickname suits better than the proper title, as the dubbed “little striker” conveys the bird’s mettle and habit of dive-bombing and defecating on anyone that intrudes upon its nest.) And of course we must thank the least bittern for being big enough to forego any grudges that might arise from our naming slight, or so we assume, not hearing any trace of bitterness in the cooing songs it sings through spring.
Sometimes being minuscule is what makes life possible in the first place, for being small may make you non-targetable to the many things that may otherwise wish to target you. Most foxes if polled on their chicken breed preferences would rather avoid the hassle of defeathering a dozen Serama bantams when they could feast equivalently on one Jersey giant. Mink farmers most likely ran through the number of weasel pelts needed for one fur coat before deciding to base their business model on the larger family relation. Being Lilliputian in stature can also be advantageous should one find themselves residing on non-fictional little isles, like the pygmy elephants once did on Crete or the mini-mammoths once did on the Channel Islands of Southern California, where compactness in size meant less time scrounging for leafy greens and more time enjoying scenic ocean vistas. But any talk of reduced caloric intake would fall deaf upon the ears of the North American least shrew, or more commonly known as the North American horror show, at least to those subterranean denizens unfortunate enough to reside within its territory. Driven by a heart revving at eight hundred beats a minute, the shrew avoids perishing via overexertion by practicing a regiment of overconsumption, devouring daily more than its body weight in food. It cares not one whit whether that comes in the form of earthworms or sow bugs or the tails of unfortunate lizards trying to eke out an easy meal, forced to shed their precious appendage to appease the clockwork death machine. And if this shrew is deemed the least shrew then all bears should be deemed least bears, for the shrew harbours no qualms about infiltrating beehives in the dead of winter to gorge on colonies too sluggish to defend themselves, biting off heads and crunching thoraxes to access gooey honeybee centers, leaving gifts of mangled wings and strewn abdomens for dismayed beekeepers, so wayward in their beliefs that their hives were safe behind electric fences and the principles of hibernation.
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But back to this GREATER, lesser, least business: Why all this rabble-rousing about names you say? What’s in a silly label or title? It is the opinion of this observer, dear reader, that names are sacred things and namings are sacred acts. Thus you can imagine his botheration toward the sorts of soul who, careless at best or malicious at worst, dole out names conflating diminutiveness with deficiencies, such as whoever christened the lesser earless lizard, or the lesser sooty owl, or the lesser mouse deer. Grey men most likely, rigid devotees to preserved things in amber jars or outdated treatises scribed on yellowed pages, working without much wonder or empathy in their hearts. Perhaps they do not realize that names may be all any of us have in the end, and that a few considerate details, a kind adjective or two, might have made many a final fading easier to stomach and harder to forget, unlike what happened with the Lesser Mascarene flying foxes, bats that once congregated in tree hollows which made them targets for hunters to smoke out and extinguish; or the Lesser Antillean rice rat from the Lesser Antilles chain of islands, so scarcely known and doubly diminished in reputation and geography that it winked out of existence without much commotion. Then there was the case of the Lesser bilby, a white-tailed, rabbit-eared bandicoot banished from the Australian outback to the immaterial plane back in the 1950s. Even its fierce and intractable spirit, so opposite of its gentler Greater relative, could not endure without a physical vessel. The only concrete thing about the Lesser bilby, besides the woefully nondescript name, is the constancy of its current status, as attested to in its official Northern Territory dossier, which contained this last line and epitaph: “No further conservation management plan can offer further help.”
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So the next time you are tasked with labeling a freshly-forthed being, do so with some measure of kindness in mind. Resist the urge to name on a whim, for a good namer recognizes that naming can only be rightly done by knowing a life through all its seasons, by sight and song, by fur and root. But don’t fret overmuch on making mistakes; what is better than being a gifted namer is being an adaptable one, one willing to learn from mistaken judgments and is able to make amends. This is a skill most paleontologists learn on the job, having to deal constantly with creatures so lacking in qualities one takes for granted, such as being alive and being intact. We can learn much from those open-minded enough not to set branding in stone, changing it when necessary to better fit the nature of their fossilized hosts, like when the Brachiosaurus displayed in Berlin was renamed a Giraffatitan from Tanzania, which was probably for the best, since most would agree that an African “titanic giraffe” hews closer to the truth than a European “arm lizard”. Holding a flexible labeling mindset can help reflect a world striving to move beyond old pale egos and dusty traditions by drawing upon a richer reserve of culture and mythology, like the christening of Hagryphus giganteus, which melds the Egyptian god of the western desert with the ancient Greek’s pre-blended lion-eagle; or Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis, which means “Colville River’s ancient grazer” not in distant Latin, but in the living Alaskan Iñupiaq tongue still spoken near where the creature once dwelled, long ago.
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Better than being named by another is to found a name for yourself, to attain that long-sought, hard-fought description that defines the essence of your being, the secret one that may not be so much spoken as made manifest. This is exemplified in the ancient branching gestures by what we call the bristlecone pine, or in the states of grace displayed by the entity simply known as the Peregrine. Once realized and embraced, the self-name cannot be co-opted by any outside powers, try as they might to hide it from sight, or to erase it with officially sanctioned labels, or to slot it slyly into classes below or beneath its deserved station. To found and forge a self requires soul searching and practiced living, and the quest to secure it can be roughgoing. And sometimes the names we discover along the way may only be a single note in a longer song, one that may only reveal itself wholly at opportune moments, like when a lowly caterpillar emerges from its chrysalis as the Bhutan Glory, or when the Diane’s bare-hearted glass tadpole transforms into the Diane’s bare-hearted glass frog, or the moment when an Icelandic Cyprine decides to trade in its planktonic drifter lifestyle to spend the next five centuries crafting a calcareous masterpiece. Perhaps your true name, dear reader, is less of a set thing, less a flawless gem to be hoarded in a safe, and more akin to breath, to water, to process in-progress, fluid and ever-changing, a shimmer of a sentence spoken while living life for life’s sake, and is something no one, no one, can ever take away from you—this work, this dignity, this worth.