The Necessity of Naming

On the Necessity of Naming

We know more than we think we do, a lot more than we can articulate. If our formal systems of thought denigrate the natural, and in fact we don’t have a name for antifragility, and fight the concept whenever we use our brains, it does not mean that our actions neglect it. Our perceptions and intuitions, as expressed in deeds, can be superior to what we know and tabulate, discuss in words, and teach in a classroom. This connects with the apophatic: what cannot be explicitly said or directly described in our current vocabulary.

In Through the Language Glass, the linguist Guy Deutscher reports that many primitive populations, without being color-blind, have verbal designations for only two or three colors. But when given a simple test, they can successfully match strings to their corresponding colors. They are capable of detecting the differences between the various nuances of the rainbow, but they do not express these in their vocabularies. These populations are culturally, though not biologically, color-blind.

Just as we are intellectually, not organically, antifragility-blind. To see the difference just consider that you need the name “blue” for the construction of a narrative, but not when you engage in action.

It is not well known that many colors we take for granted had no name for a long time, and had no names in the central texts in Western culture. Ancient Mediterranean texts, both Greek and Semitic, also had a reduced vocabulary of a small number of colors polarized around the dark and the light—Homer and his contemporaries were limited to about three or four main colors: black, white, and some indeterminate part of the rainbow, often subsumed as red, or yellow.

I contacted Guy Deutscher. He was extremely generous with his help and pointed out to me that the ancients even lacked words for something as elementary as blue. This absence of the word “blue” in ancient Greek explains the recurring reference by Homer to the “wine-dark sea” (oinopa ponton), which has been quite puzzling to readers (including this one).

Interestingly, it was the British Prime Minister William Gladstone who first made this discovery in the 1850s (and was unfairly and thoughtlessly reviled for it by the usual journalists). Gladstone, quite an erudite, wrote, during his interregnum between political positions, an impressive seventeen-hundred-page treatise on Homer. In the last section, Gladstone announced this limitation of color vocabulary, attributing our modern sensitization to many more nuances of color to a cross-generational training of the eye. But regardless of these variations of color in the culture of the time, people were shown to be able to identify the nuances—unless physically color-blind.

Gladstone was impressive in many respects. Aside from his erudition, force of character, respect for the weak, and high level of energy, four very attractive attributes (respect for the weak being, after intellectual courage, the second most attractive quality to this author), he showed remarkable prescience. He figured out what few in his day dared to propose: that the Iliad corresponds to a true story (the city of Troy had not been discovered yet). In addition, even more prescient and of great relevance to this book, he was insistent upon a balanced fiscal budget: fiscal deficits have proven to be a prime source of fragility in social and economic systems.