Lots Of Name Words

Some years ago I listened to a review of one relation between language and culture which observed that (paraphrased): the importance of a thing in a culture can be measured by the number of names the thing has.

It was observed that, for example, some African tribes had more than 400 words for "cow" while the Western world has hundreds of words for "car" (off the top of my head I can think of dozens).

  Cow with brown spots, a hump, and no horns, good for meat.
  Cow with wide shoulders, short horns, and large hooves, good for milk.
  Cow with long horns, skinny hips, wide hooves, good for harsh conditions.
    Examples?  I have no idea.  In English we have several (Angus, Jersey, Guernsey, Holstein)
               but not hundreds that I know of.

  Car with flared fenders, aggressive curves, large engine, two seats, two doors, for road sports.
    Examples:  Corvette, Firebird Trans-Am, Porsche Carrera, Audi TT, Mazda RX-8, etc.
  Car with four doors, lots of room, plenty of towing power, for executives and families.
    Examples:  Lincoln Town Car, Cadillac Seville, Ford Crown Victoria, Chevy Caprice Classic, etc.
  Car with four-wheel drive, removable top, roll bar, and so on, for off-road driving.
    Examples:  Jeep Wrangler, Hummer, etc.

Now, I don't have a good handle on whether this thesis is true, but there are some interesting observations that can go with this.

To a large segment of the population, there are "computers" and "software" and "programming" but not many care to differentiate. To a smaller group (subculture?) there are classes of computers, and to an even smaller group there are named motherboards, CPUs, branded RAMs, disk drives, and quality/average/crap vendors (Alien Ware, Dell, Gateway, PackardBell?). Overlapping in this group are those for whom programming is differentiated by language, methodology, religion (did I say that?), and so on. And then there are the users for whom branded applications are hotly debated for their merits (MS Word, Word Perfect, TeX).

You can (sometimes) kind of measure which flavor of geek you have by his bookshelf (lots of O'Reilly books, lots of books on Perl, lots of books on C++, exactly one book on C [first edition], and so on).

Interestingly, as "important" to the Western culture as they are, computers have few names. Cars have lots of names. Even cameras have more names than computers. Hell, coffee has more names than computers.

So what does that say? Computers are completely vital to the machinery of the culture, but the culture doesn't accord them the importance of, say, good coffee.

This isn't a terribly coherent discussion of the topic, but I'm sure there's somebody out there who can help flesh this out. And if I haven't offended Peter too badly, perhaps he'll chuck in a comment or two.

-- GarryHamilton

I'm not sure that BrandNames? qualify in the same way that substance names do (like the mythical 100 Eskimo words for snow). So we have SUVs, sportscars, luxury cars, and econoboxes as car types we note, but car fanatics have lots of terms for engine power differences, brakes, etc. I do agree that if a culture has words for something and have a lot of categories for that something, it's an important thing, like Yiddish words for emotional states (chutzpah, is a good one. Another interesting example is the dichotomy between the root words for the English terms for animals and the food from the animals (pig/pork, cow/beef)

As a rule I would agree that brands don't carry the same weight as, say, species names, but when it comes to cars even the least interested of people can picture the difference between a Porsche and a Ferrari or Corvette. Just saying "sports car" or "racing car" really doesn't convey the whole picture. While animals and trees have a taxonomy, cars don't grow and breed and self-perpetuate. Their imagery is of necessity associated with their designers (Shelby), their makers (Ford), and the designated identifiers chosen by them (Cobra) -- oh, and the year(s) they were made.

As far as breeding, someone once compiled a set of outlines of the VW Beetle from every model year up to sometime in the 60s, and there was a very clear trend in the profiles as time went on

I'm, fairly certain that within the car context the clearest conveyance of exactly which car you mean will involve trademarked brand names and, given that we don't have any applicable taxonomy for automobiles, that's just going to have to be good enough. There just isn't a clearer way of referring to that "somewhat angular, German-made, four-door, 2.5 liter, 6-cylinder, 184-hp automobile from the Bayerische Motor Werken company" than simply saying "BMW 325i" which evokes a complete image rather than a generic composite.

At any rate, I don't think the derivation of the names is as important as the fact that precise and diverse things are communicated by such terse referents as '57 Bel Air and '61 Fairlane.

How about '59 Beetle? When I talk to people about my first car, those who know cars are immediately aware that I drove an old rear-engine VW with one of the earlier large back windows, a 6-volt ignition system, uncompensated rear camber, a flat windshield, no gas gauge, and a foot-operated dimmer switch -- along with dozens of other little bits of detail that differentiate that precise car from its siblings of earlier and later years. And those who don't know cars that well get a picture of "an older VW bug" which is probably adequate for them.

The fabric of the automotive cultural tapestry is indeed rich, and each example of the art is distinctly named.

I think there may have been a point in that somewhere. -- gh