I see no reason to give a name to an inanimate object. It won’t come when you call (at least not yet), chew slippers, or hog the bed like anything that’s worthy of a name. It won’t borrow money and never pay it back.
For some reason, even though they lack such endearing charms, inanimates garner our love. And pet names. Stuffed animals, cars, boats, TV sets, furniture, outbuildings, even nuclear reactors get names like Big Betty or Bob the Hog. Silly, really, this desire for sentience in our artifacts. But to be honest, our artifacts are becoming more sentient-like. Some of them even talk.
Why?
Certainly there are circumstances where a bauble that speaks would be helpful: talking books for the blind, talking owner’s manuals for the illiterate, talking computers for the multi-tasker. But talking cars, talking buildings, talking anything not endowed with free choice just adds to noise pollution.
I had a Maxima back in the '80s that reminded me to buckle up when I got in and cut the lights when I got out. Couldn’t stand it. It embarrassed me and I couldn’t figure out how to turn the voice off. Finally had to sell it so my friends would hang out with me again.
A while back I had a job in Manhattan. One of those kinds of jobs where you have to get to work before sun up and you’d leave until after dark even in the summer. Days were long and I was in danger of contracting a horrendous monitor tan, so I forced myself to take lunchtimes to get out and collect some real UV rays. I would take long walks through the midtown pedestrian traffic. Oh, the humanity!
It was exhilarating, freeing, mind-expanding, like the old self-medicating days of the '60s. I loved it even if the crowds were sometimes as claustrophobic as the 23rd floor cubicle I had temporarily escaped from. Somehow it felt to me like getting back to nature, like I had discovered mankind in his natural environment. Perhaps I was just drunk on bus fumes.
Anyway, one day as I passed through the tunnel between 45th and 46th on Park Avenue, the old Helmsley building spoke. I think it was broadcasting talk radio or ads or maybe directives to turn around and pick up a copy of Irish Times at the Hudson News stand in Grand Central. How revolting.
I was insulted, angry, hurt. The last thing I wanted to hear was a canned broadcast blocking out the organic, real-time conversing, explaining, declaiming, exhorting, exhuberating, pontificating, singing, and thinking out loud that Manhattan crowds are world renowned for. It was an affront to the natural order of things and certainly in bad taste. Can’t we have one place on the planet we aren’t bombarded with audio?
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