What’s in a name?

We don’t know the name of the first person to have possessed a name. The earliest individual known to have had an identity lived in Mesopotamia between 3500 and 3000 BC, where their name, “Kushim”, was written onto a clay tablet to record the buying and selling of grain.

We can be sure, however, that the significance of naming in our early history must have meant something different to what it means today, otherwise there would be no Smiths in the world. Nor would there be any Bakers and Walkers. Those three surnames, among so many, represented trades – the blacksmith (itself derived from the verb “to smite”), the baker, and the fuller – and all three professions came along too late to properly delineate one’s heritage from the moment the first grunt became indicative of individual identity.

That begs the question: what was the name of the first Mr Smith before he was known as “Mr Smith”?

The point might, of course, be purely academic. Richard Dawkins makes the argument that “[t]he real population of the world at the time of Julius Caesar was only a few million, and all of us, all seven billion of us, are descended from them. We are indeed all related. Every marriage is between more or less distant cousins, who already share lots and lots of ancestors before they have children of their own.”

It follows, then, that we should all have the same surname, we are all in the family “Homo”, but as Dawkins continues: “By the same kind of argument, we are distant cousins not only of all human beings but of all animals and plants. You are a cousin of my dog and of the lettuce you had for lunch, and of the next bird that you see fly past the window. You and I share ancestors with all of them.”

It’s one of those arguments that is humbling to the point that it becomes existentially numbing. By this logic, you are currently staring at cousins of mine/yours/ours in your hands, in the form of the device on which you’re reading this. That plastic is derived from petrochemicals made of decayed biomass deposited in ancient swamps and oceans.

Alas poor single-celled bacteria, you never got to know your Aunt Doris…

Yet the overwhelming sense of being lost in the interconnectedness of organic life is perhaps a more modern version of the process of alienation that made names so important at some point in our prehistory. Once humans moved beyond the tribe, greater importance would have been placed on identifying individuals in the gathering crowds. Names are part of the emergent sense of identity, now so fundamental to who we are. It should be no surprise that they remain powerful voodoo, often conveying a sense of destiny that’s entirely specious.

“All the best Englishmen have foreign names,” says J.B. Hallam, the purveyor of fake documents in the movie Funeral In Berlin.

“Sorry, I don’t feel like an Edmund Dorf,” complains Harry Palmer (Michael Caine). “Can’t I be Rock Hunter?”

“No,” snaps Hallam. “You aren’t the type.”

It’s part of our irrational makeup that we cannot escape the supernaturalism of names – of being what Hallam called a “type” – and the feeling that reality can be shaped simply by the act of branding a person a certain way. Change the name, change the person. The British government clearly believes this; what with the announcement that Michael Gove wouldn’t be taking over at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. No, he would be taking over at “The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities”.

Embedding political slogans into names does not feel like a healthy development in how anything, let alone government departments, should be named. Names are too intimately tied up with our sense of reality. What’s next with Boris Johnson’s zeal to get campaign slogans into ministries? The Home and Get More Police On the Streets Office? The Department of World-Class Education? Perhaps Rishi Sunak will be happy heading HM’s Put Money in Your Pocket Treasury.

At a time when the government seems eager to project seriousness on the world stage – the AUKUS deal being a prime example – it seems intent on projecting triviality at home. Or it would be trivial if it weren’t also so damn sinister.

It’s a cliché to quote Orwell whenever words are manipulated for political ends but sometimes it does feel like our dystopia matches that of 1984. The purpose of Newspeak is memorably described as “to narrow the range of thought […] In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” In the afterword to his novel, however, Orwell describes Newspeak as also being “founded on the English language as we now know it, though many Newspeak sentences, even when not containing newly-created words, would be barely intelligible to an English-speaker of our own day.” Words were classified by three vocabularies: A, B, and C. The first contained the words needed for everyday life. C contained scientific words. B, however, contained words that were created for political purposes. They were compound words such as BELLYFEEL, which means “a blind, enthusiastic acceptance” and GOODTHINK meaning “orthodoxy”.

Aren’t we heading that way with “Levelling-up”? It might be an attempt to prove the government is taking social and economic disparities across the country seriously, but it feels like an attempt to influence our perceptions as if having a Department of UPLEVEL really does make levelling up more of a reality than a campaign slogan. In a world in which branding is increasingly the mechanism driving culture, we’re heading towards a Department of Wellness and Ministry of Body Positivity, derived from the spit and shine of modern marketing. It’s a world of NLP, that unsettling offshoot of psychology known as “neuro-linguistic programming”, where words can be deployed in a way to affect a person’s behaviour.

Just as we learn that anonymity on the internet grants us a superpower that we don’t yet fully understand, names remain important elements of language and, as much as politics has always been a domain for language, language must not become the domain of politics.