What's in a name?

Just when you think you have a top-notch memory, you commit the dreaded social faux pas: forgetting someone's name.\n"Hey, I remember you. You're Henry. Harry? Hortence? Shaniqua? Oh, your name is Ted? I was close."\nWhen you forget a name, you bring eternal embarrassment to yourself, shame to your family, and worst of all, you look like a jerk.\nRemembering the names of all our acquaintances, friends, siblings and significant others is taxing. IU has about 38,000 students. That's a lot of names, and that number doesn't even include professors, janitors or other people with names.\nWe already have a lot of important things to remember. Why clutter our minds with frivolous nomenclature? According to the British Psychological Society, mental capacity decreases with age. We're fighting a losing battle. I say surrender now. Let's make everything simpler and eliminate names altogether.\nThe first logical solution that comes to mind is assigning everyone a number. But I have enough trouble remembering my own student ID number, let alone everyone else's. So that idea is out.\nA May 2004 article from Nature magazine's Web site stated memory is linked closely to the senses. Visualizing our names would be easier on the brain. I suggest a tattooed symbol on everyone's forehead, assigned at birth. Prince knew what he was doing with the symbol thing. \nNew parents pour their hearts into picking out the perfect name. But parents have enough to worry about without having to label their newborn. The stress of picking names can be so great that www.babyzone.com provides a "name wizard" that makes suggestions by "statistically analyzing real baby names in a database, then creating new letter combinations." Some actual suggestions for a new baby girl are Xeleldor and Xarp. And for a boy: Foirkyn or Ugrtomyl.\nThe name wizard proves names are ridiculous. If naming a baby is so difficult that parents must resort to randomly generated letter combinations, something is wrong. \nForehead tattoos might seem a little radical, but I'm not suggesting bar codes for government tracking. I just want to be one step closer to a simpler utopian society. How can one word truly sum up a person as a whole? Names are a feeble attempt by "the man" to put us into categories.\nAll we have to do is free ourselves from the oppression of labels and mandate new, more efficient labels with pictorial symbols.\nDitching names has numerous benefits: \n• Forehead tattoos would eliminate those awkward introductions, but the tattoos would need to be equipped with braille for the vision impaired.\n• We could drastically reduce nasty gossip. It's hard to talk about someone behind their back if you can't use a name. \n• The social benefits spread to our youth as well. Children are merciless, and school can be a rough place if your parents were high when they named you. If names were eliminated, elementary school children would have fewer reasons to tease each other.\n• Name loss would put the surprise back in life. When calling someone on the phone, it would no longer be necessary to say, "Hello, this is so and so." Just start talking. Figuring out who it is can be a fun game for the person on the other end.\nSome argue that a name is crucial to one's personal identity, but how do you think Xarp feels? We will never find freedom until we relinquish the shackles of names. Eliminating labels takes the strain off our waning memories and makes everyone a little more equal. Besides putting a stop to that infernal name game song once and for all, we can each be a nameless face in the crowd, just another number ... number bo bumber.