the practice of naming

Do names really matter? Linguist Geoffrey Pullum (1991) didn't seem to think so. Debunking the myth that Eskimos have hundreds of words for “snow,” he commented

…even if there were a large number of roots for different types of snow in some Arctic language, this would not, objectively, be intellectually interesting; it would be a most mundane and unremarkable fact. Horsebreeders have various names for breeds, sizes, and ages of horses; botanists have names for leaf shapes; interior decorators have names for shades of mauve; printers have many different names for different fonts (Caslon, Garamond, Helvetica, Times Roman, and so on), naturally enough. (p. 165)

Pullum’s humorous example, however, fails to capture the very real power naming can hold.

Political theorist Alberto Melucci (1996) claimed that "the real domination is today the exclusion from the power of naming" (p. 179). Closer to home, Carolyn Rude and Kelli Cargile Cook (2004) suggested that the uncertainty about what to call professional and technical communication may affect the marketability of candidates seeking academic employment. Looking beyond the academy, David Norton (2000) explored the effects of re/naming at a corporation, describing how an “information architect” adopted this title and ultimately improved his status and the status of his work as a result. The information architect drew from technical communication, human-computer interaction, rhetoric, and ethnography, but these fields were not necessarily recognized or valued by his colleagues or their clients. He steered clear of terminology that they were unlikely to accept and converted rhetorical terminology into marketing and business strategy jargon. This re/naming, Norton observed, resulted in greater appreciation for the information architect’s work. More importantly, it changed the way in which he conceptualized his own work and led him to explore previously unrecognized avenues. According to Norton, names can lead to new meaning, enhanced status, and increased power. This webtext suggests that the names of instructional environments also have this potential.

If the practice of naming is indeed the process by which social agents create reality, as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1991) maintained, then the names of wireless instructional environments structure perception of them. In Bourdieu’s schema, public, explicit naming is a form of categorization that enables the social world. Controlling the categories that dictate the perception of that world via naming is to control the social world itself. Put another way, the university is a social world that is made—and potentially unmade—by naming. Well-chosen names for wireless settings could pre-filter perceptions of these places and help distinguish our efforts and impress the value of such instruction on those even just passing by. For those who do enter, some names could lead occupants to conceptualize their work along new lines and broaden the scope of writing instruction.

Rude, Cook, Norton, and Bourdieu demonstrated that naming asserts power of the identity of someone, something, some action, some place. But naming is also an attempt to account for new concepts, objects, or spaces. Because metaphors often underscore points of accord between the familiar and the unfamiliar, metaphors are widely embedded in naming practices.