Suresh Menon: What's in a name?

"I think I'll carry Susan with me to the office tonight," said my friend whose wife was named Alice. So who was Susan, and why would he carry her to work? I approached the topic carefully and in as roundabout a manner as possible, hemming and hawing and sometimes ‘err'ing, and on one occasion, actually even harrumphing.

These things have to be handled delicately, you know. Shout out, "Who the heck is this mystery Susan anyway?" and you not only lose a friend, but any chances of meeting Susan, too, go out of the window.

And then the truth emerged. Susan was not a blonde bombshell. She was a tie. A ‘what?' you ask. A tie. It seems that in his large collection there was one - paisley patterned, gentle in colour and smooth to touch - of which my friend was particularly fond. But when he asked his wife to bring him the tie, he found it difficult to describe it, not having been to Scotland and not knowing the first thing about Paisley.

"You know the one with those patterns, pastel colours - the one that I wore to the Stevie Wonder concert," he'd say and the conversation would get side-tracked. "Oh yes, that was a wonderful concert wasn't it? Remember how he..." his wife would respond, and there'd be no favourite tie at hand.

To get around the problem, my friend decided to give his favourite tie a name. Susan. Now there's no problem. "Get Susan," he tells his wife and she knows exactly what he's talking about.

"The name of a man", wrote Marshall McLuhan, "is a numbing blow from which he never recovers." How ties feel about being named after women has not been recorded. After all, what's in a name? A tie by any other name would hang just as well.

But imagine if we didn't have names for tables and chairs and books and body parts such as pancreas, and whooping cough and the highest mountain peak in the world and the feeling you get when watching Shakira perform. Or if each of us had private names for them. So one man's chair would be another man's table or one patient's common cold is another one's liver dysfunction. Philosophers have spent a lifetime pondering such issues.

If all agree on what love is or what constitutes anger, does that tie up a word and its meaning for ever? I don't know.

What I do know is the sorrow of my friend. The reverse, he explains sadly, does not happen. He cannot say ‘ tie' and hope that his wife will bring him a blonde bombshell.