The Human Need to Name Things

We can’t help ourselves, we humans. We like to name things. We need to name things.

Naming things has a long and venerable history in Western culture. God himself invited Adam to name the birds of the sky as well as the animals, wild and domestic. It’s right there at Genesis 2:19:

^“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 . . . ”

A Tall Patch of Weeds

It was that very human impulse — endorsed by God? — that had me standing stock-still in a patch of weeds one summer day in the Pacific Northwest.

It was a stand of fireweed, to be exact. Some of its blossoms were glowing in the bright afternoon sun. Others were flattened in the shade of the nearby Douglas firs. Depending on where I stood, the color of those petals and sepals changed and changed and changed. Were they purple? Blue? Pink?

I couldn’t make up my mind. So I took photos.

Back home in the Bay Area I pulled the fireweed images up on my laptop, determined to give a name to those elusive colors once and for all.

The Human Need to Name Things weed blossoms looking blue now — These fireweed blossoms turned blue — purple? — in the shade of the nearby Douglas fir trees. *Photo by Barbara Newhall*

Sure enough, I still couldn’t do it. The hues had changed minute by minute and hour by hour during my visit to the fireweed patch, and they were doing the same now on my computer monitor.

I Googled myself over to Wikipedia to see where my elusive colors might fit in on the color wheel. Along the way, I stumbled upon some promising color charts — including Goethe’s eighteenth-century color wheel.

Lunch With a Buddhist

Succumbing to the human need to name things, I was about to close in on the many names for purple when I remembered it was time to meet an old friend for lunch.

As I dug into my feta and spinach phyllo over at La Mediterranee in Berkeley, my friend, a Buddhist, turned the conversation to the Western mind’s tendency to judge, make distinctions and assign things to categories.

Our brains get so busy putting things in their place—naming them, describing them—she said, we forget to . . .

The Human Need to Name Things A stand of pink fireweed grows six feet tall. — The weedy fireweed plant can get tall, with flowers blooming at eye-level. *Photo by Barbara Newhall*

Forget to what? I can’t remember what she said next. It was something pithy and useful and wise, but my mind, along with my fork, was moving from the piquant feta and spinach on one side of my plate to the cinnamony chicken Cilicia on the other — and back to the project that awaited me at home.

I told myself that as soon as I got back to my writing room, I’d reboot my computer, pull up my fireweed photos, and spend some time cruising the internet for ways to name their colors.

A Westerner Set Free

Back home, I set my inner Westerner free. A few clicks of the mouse, and there they were, dozens of stunning words to choose from: heliotrope, crimson, amethyst, violet, mauve, magenta, cerise — words (words!) as luscious as the colors they name.

More stories about flowers and spectacular places at “Help, I Can’t Remember the Names of My Flowers.” Also, “Yosemite — More Beautiful Than the Himalayas?”