Naming & Creativity

Naming, is no doubt an activity challenging the human creativity. unlike activies like art, music, literature which are the privileges of small groups, naming is an activity partcipate by most people. We name things, more or less. At least, like it or not, we are given names when we are born. Naming is hard, though we have almost contributed everyone's brain cells to it, the status quo hasn't changed a little.

I have to admit I have difficulty with naming too. When i write programs, there's alwasy one thing makes me headache - giving names to variables. Same thing happend when I was chosing an English name for myself. Name, in my opinion, should firstly be sound, acceptable by most people - Weird name is not serious, respectful and responsible enough. On the other hand, name should be distinctive. It's sometime shameful to duplicate another's name. naming itself is contradictive.

I sufferd from naming - my name is abused, I have met 4 people with the same name as mine, seen my name printed on the newspaper which is not mine, and there are 1,750,000 search results of my name in Google. wait, can i call it "my name" again?. I shouldn't have complained too much about my name, this is a historical issue. what can i do is try to stop the tragedy happening again.

What I cannot agree with is re-name some good names. "Zongshan Road" can be found in nearly all the big cities of China, and there are also numerous "Beijing Street", "Yan'an Road", "People's Square", "Liberation Road". I don't believe they were built with these names. They are renamed - in order to show the creativity inside the brain cells of the people from a nation with great population.