Theft at the Public Till
Most things people classify get a name or a label. Naming is a cognitive process that renders the world manageable. It is significant in this context that various cultures associate naming with religious and mythical ideas of original creation and of the transformation of chaos into order -- for example the story of Genesis, in which creation is considered completed only after man has named its constituent parts. By the same token we often assume a phenomenon to be understood just because it has received a label. Naming creates an order and also renders the unknown familiar. Early American immigrants often used names of places and cities of their countries of origin to designate the new habitats and this without concern for physical resem- blance. Similarly names are used to enhance and embellish. -Park Avenue in New York, for example, is suspiciously lacking a usable park or even trees. Although naming is no doubt fundamental in coping with the environment, a certain form of knowledge does not lend itself to labels. This knowledge may be retained as images that are not necessarily visual in nature. The memory of a good bottle of wine is an appropriate example. Wines have been described in flowery words, but inevitably one has to taste it to know what the description means Douglas Hofstadter writes of “the nearly trivial observation that mem- bers of a familiar perceptual- category automatically evoke the name of the category. Thus, when we see a staircase, no matter how big or small it is. no matter how twisted or straight, no matter how ornamented or plain, modern or old, dirty or clean, the label ‘staircase’ spontaneously jumps to center stage without any conscious effort at all. obviously, the same goes for tele- phones, mailboxes, milk shakes, butterflies, model airplanes, stretch pants, gossip magazines, women’s shoes, musical instruments, beachballs, station wagons. grocery stores. and so on. This phenomenon, whereby an external physical stimulus indirectly activates the proper part of our memory perme- ates human life and language so thoroughly that most people have a hard time working up any interest in it, let alone astonishment, yet it is probably the most key of all mental mechanisms. This is a particularly difficult problem for the government bureau- cracy because of its near total embrace of labelling as a defining method in
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