Hacker News Reader

Comment by adwn | Hacker News Reader

Can you be more specific, please?

Also, I hate these kinds of lists. Are we just supposed to take the author by his word? He says:

> If you need examples of real names which disprove any of the above commonly held misconceptions, I will happily introduce you to several.

Then why doesn't he? I'm really curious about that last one: "People have names."

View on HN

I had a neighbour without a name. He was Tiwi. When a member of the tribe, higher on the totem pole than you, dies, then you lose that name for an appropriate mourning period.

An elder of reknown, with the name, died. The tribe decided that the name would never be taken again, as a matter of respect.

So, as a sign of respect, my neighbour gave up his name, permanently. His license and passport have a number, not a name.

A newborn baby doesn't have a name, and depending on the culture and country there could be days, months or even years before they get one.

That's already covered by points 32–36. I really want to see a counter-example to "People have names" that doesn't fall under "toddler who has yet to survive their first winter". When you're old enough that members of your community talk about you, they'll find some way to refer to you – maybe by an informal nickname, maybe by a description of kinship ("Dave's second son") – and that would be considered a name by the standards of that "falsehoods" list.

While I was reading about Burmese names, I also learned that people in Burma can change their names pretty much at will, so even the idea that a name is a stable identifier for a person is not necessarily true, not to mention the whole legal name change thing or the common practice in many Western countries of women taking there husband’s name at marriage. I remember as a kid seeing occasional pieces of mail addressed to my mom under her maiden name even though she had been married for 15 or so years at that point. (Then there was the mail that I occasionally got addressed to “Donald Lopez” thanks to badly written code misparsing the joint ownership of the home I owned with my wife before the divorce.)

Your IT system may need to handle entries linked to people who don't have names, for example, recording that some treatment was given to a baby who died soon after birth before being given a name.

That's a good point.

> > If you need examples of real names which disprove any of the above commonly held misconceptions, I will happily introduce you to several.

> Then why doesn't he? I'm really curious about that last one: "People have names."

Indeed, I dare to suggest that, while there are people who don't have names, there is definitionally no real name that can disprove the misconception.

Not sure if this exactly works, but how about ‘John Doe’?

A "John Doe" [1] presumably still has a name, even if it's unknown to you specifically. That would be a counter-example to "You always know a person's name", not to "People have names".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Doe

Reply on news.ycombinator.com