Juliet: What’s in a name?
Romeo: Everything’s in a name Juliet; that’s how we got into this mess.
Juliet: That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet
Romeo: Yeah, good point well made.

Names have a use. It is easier to call a spade a spade than to call a spade a tool for digging, paring, or cutting ground etc. Around 1900, some philosophers made the startling discovery that not all words denote an object. Words, like Santa Claus, God, fairies, love, Malcolm Turnbull’s spine, might not refer to any real thing. In his later punk phase, Wittgenstein (the only philosopher worth the ignominy of namedropping) argued that words are like tools they are “characterised by their use”; “naming something is like attaching a label to a thing.”

Names, however, are quite overrated. John Ruskin cracked onto this about 160 years ago, and because he says it so well, I’m going to quote him:

Words, if they are not watched, will do deadly work sometimes ... there are masked words abroad ... which nobody understands, but which everybody uses, and most people will also fight for, live for, or even die for, fancying they mean this or that...

If one swaps names for words in the above passage, we see how names can be a crutch; the equivalent of buying someone a gift card instead of an actual present. Of course, ”gift card” is doublespeak; despite its surface civility, “gift card” signifies the opposite: “I don’t know enough about you to buy you something you would actually want.” A name tells you nothing about a person. Like buying gift cards, knowing someone’s name doesn’t mean you know anything about the person. Personally, I think it’s better to know something about someone than their known name, just as it is better to get someone a proper present, not a gift card. Knowing something about someone, a description, is the denoting equivalent of buying them a present they really want—The Collected Speeches of Kevin Rudd instead of a gift card for the ALP merchandise shop. There must be one, right? How else do you signal to people, “Don’t ask me anything about immigration policy?”

Politicians have as great a fancy for names as bad friends for gift cards. But the problem with a name is that it doesn’t tell you anything about the thing it denotes. I don’t really know what a “jete´” is or what movement “jete´” denotes, so conversations about ballet sort of go over my head. Names also have connotations. A racist slur, for example, denotes a particular group of people, but it also connotes some negative feeling of the speaker, even hatred, towards that group.

In politics, the connotation of a name is often more significant than the denotation. “Liberals” got themselves in a lather over whether Trump was a fascist or not because fascism has such a powerfully negative connotation. Yet, scholars of fascism are incredibly divided over what exactly constitutes fascism. Mastheads like The New York Times could have saved themselves serious bother by describing Trump’s actions instead of labelling them; anyone who finds fascism abhorrent will be revolted by a mere description of Trump’s conduct, and anyone who isn’t disgusted by a description of Trump’s conduct probably won’t change their mind if the NYT calls Trump a fascist.

The overuse of names also occurs when politicians talk about themselves. Some “socialist” politicians have a similar fixation with names, bewildering when no one, especially critics of socialism, seems to know what socialism actually is. Suppose that the general conception of socialism is vague at best, and that the term “socialism” has negative connotations among significant sections of the electorate. In this case, it seems better to describe your policies than name them.

Socialists should consider dropping the name, however much that might hurt. And liberals might consider dropping the namedropping. Names aren’t the be-all and end-all. For socialists, achieving a fair and equitable society is surely more important than calling it a socialist society. It’s better to describe than to name; better to buy actual presents than gift cards.