That which we call a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.

I never realised this during my several years of teaching Romeo and Juliet to high-schoolers, but this is just the type of thing an infatuated teenage girl would say.

Because names do matter. In fantasy fiction knowing someone’s true name gives you power over them. In the Bible names were often a prophesy about someone’s life purpose, sometimes decreed even before their birth, and divine calling on someone’s life was marked by a changing of their name. In many cultures today still, mispronouncing or shortening someone’s name (because it’s hard to pronounce) is a terrible insult, because their name means something and if you change the name, it no longer means the same thing.

In most Western cultures we’ve forgotten this. We think, like Juliet, that a name is just a label that we can use as long as we need it, and discard when we’re done with it.

A friend of mine is stepping out in faith and starting something new, and I’m part of a group of people she’s brought together to give her support, feedback, and some accountability. She also asked us for help coming up with a name for her new venture.

There were a few suggestions, and none of them were bad, but they were all so…everyday. They were generic. There are likely a few score other people using the exact same names, each one intending it to mean something slightly different.

So I didn’t suggest a name. I asked a question. What is your goal? What makes you stand out? What name fits what you plan to do, and that wouldn’t make as much sense if anyone else used it? In other words, what is your brand, that will make people think of you first and foremost, and no one else?

An oft-repeated joke among software engineers, attributed to Phil Karlton, is that there are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. Coming up with clear, descriptive, but unique names for stuff while coding is surprisingly hard. It’s something I think of so continuously, it spills over into other areas of my life these days I guess.

I think Shakespeare understood the importance of names. That’s why those famous words were uttered by a foolish teenage girl, and not by a great emperor, king or general. What’s in a name? The very essence of what something is, so choose carefully!