Man-eating dinosaurs

Suppose I said there were about a quarter million man-eating dinosaurs currently living in the state of Georgia.  You'd probably laugh, right?  Or perhaps you'd simply look at me as if I had just told you that reptilian humanoids from Zeta Reticuli secretly ran the world in the guise of Illuminati, Freemasons, and the Knights of Malta.

But what if I said there were a quarter million alligators living here?  Well, that's a perfectly ordinary and reasonable claim.  Everyone knows gators live down in the south Georgia swamps.  (And, occasionally, make their way up to the Atlanta suburbs.)

The difference in reaction is all in the name.  The names we give things carry power, and how we react to things is, in part, a function of what we call them.  Shakespeare knew this, which is why his "What's in a name?" monologue is recited by a character who ends up dead.  Juliet wants to believe that names don't carry any real meaning, that it's only the underlying reality that matters, and she pays the price for her naivete.  It turns out that names matter a lot.  They're life and death matters.

In the novel 1984, the government is in the process of removing words from the English language.  Its goal is to control thought by controlling the mechanism with which people think.  It's a brilliant bit of imaginative writing by Orwell.  Names have power, especially true names, and if you want to strip people of their power, then one way to do that is to make it impossible for them to speak truly about anything.

So, fiction writers, give some thought to your names.  Not just character names, but names of machines, places, rituals, animals, plants, and so on and so forth.  There's power in those words.