When my son Scott (Tall Penguin) took Spanish in high school, he had to make a language arts project. So we blew up a balloon, covered it with papier mache, painted it black, attached a short clothes line "fuse," and labeled it la bomba. That was long before 9/11, so it went over big and he got an A. Today we don't dare call things bombs so casually or we'd have the Homeland Security folks all over us.
Hypersensitive now to theft or political incorrectness when we travel, we try to call our laptops, camcorders, and digital cameras by nicknames so strangers don't know what we're referring to. I'm typing this on Nebs2, for example, and my wife, Barbara's, digital camera was originally called La Bomba. But when we flew to New York last September, we thought we'd better give it a different nickname. It just wouldn't do to shout across the boarding line, "Hey, do you have La Bomba?" or "Now where did I put that Bomb?" So La Bomba became, in a new bright orange foam case for easy visibility, "Orange Julius" or "Jules" for short. Everyone in my family keeps a watch out for Jules, and Barb uses it to take and load all those snappy photos for her blog, Iris Blue.
But Jules, alas, is getting older by digital standards, and has a tendency to blur unless held rock-steady. I messed up my pix of Grandpa Bingham whom we visited in Indiana this June, for example, when I couldn't hold it steady enough even sitting around a table. So my family all chipped in and bought me a fabulous, compact digital camera with excellent anti-shaking settings for my July birthday recently, already pre-nicknamed Nigel (Barb's idea). Nigel got a gray foam case with straps like Jules, and of course gets to be used by everyone who went in on it. I get to keep it, however, in my custody and care.
So welcome, Nigel, to this intrepid photojournalistic blogging family, and may you record and publish many an excellent image on all our posts. Live long and prosper!
2 comments:
Congratulations.
-R
Naming things is an art. You have to come up with the right name that sums up the character of what you're naming.
Pets are the most obvious example, and T.S. Eliot even wrote a wonderful poem about "The Naming of Cats." Boats also need names, and the story of the naming of a boat has enchanted many a sailing-club audience.
Motor vehicles also should have names, even if most people don't go about anthropomorphizing vehicles -- I have El Caballero (because the model name sounds more romantic in Spanish) and Babe (big and blue and works like an ox).
I think my favorite naming experience was a friend who called his computer (this was a long time ago; it was the very first model of Macintosh) Malachi. That Old Testament prophet's name translates as "my messenger."
Before the Internet, before email, before any of the technologies that actually allowed computers to serve as messengers (except in limited, usually government, ways), this friend foresaw that his computer would be a messenger. How cool.
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