The Name Game...

Banana fanana fo fanana... Jim Croce, "I got a name"

There are very rarely people who don't have names. One of my sons and his wife could not agree on a name for their new baby for a day. So for roughly 24 hours that kid didn't have a full name. On the records for that brief period the kid was just Baby Bananas.

Are there any cultures or countries where babies are routinely born and not given names? Probably not. But who knows...

How long do you think it's been since a human being went through life without a name? How many humans went all their lives answering to "Hey, you!"? I doubt it made any difference in their lives. Think about how many generations of humans there have been in the roughly 180,000 years homo sapiens have existed. When did 'talking' become something normal? Wouldn't the first names have been nouns used to identify familiar objects? Do I have a great-great to the Nth power great grandfather named Clod, whose sister was named Ashes? Who invented the name Jane? Or Bob? Or Kim, or Chan or Ali, etc., etc.?

There is a school of religious thought that propounds that all of us are offspring of a God, with that Jesus guy, whose birthday approaches, being a brother of ours. Do you think that this heavenly father gave us names as we were 'born' or created or jury-rigged, or whatever He did back before the foundation of the world? If He did, did He keep a record, or does He just have all our names memorized? And will He one day tell us what our first, and the really important name, is? Will each name be as pretty as the next, or will I get stuck with something that rhymes with something funny? Is my real name Horace? Are numbers or symbols involved? Which brings up a point... When He's just hanging out with His homies, what language does He speak? Maybe it's latin, but I'm guessing it isn't.