Our national language, and the culture from which it has formed, is the rightful inheritance of all English-speaking people. It deserves to be taught with knowledge and respect. English is now spoken, also, by more than 500 million people around the world. They need the opportunity to learn to speak and write it confidently, and correctly. Grammar provides a language to talk about language. As a mechanic needs naming words for the parts of an engine, so a student needs naming words for the components of speech and writing.
This book is about personal names, something of abiding interest to specialists and lay readers alike. Over a million people have checked the American Name Society website since 1996, for instance. Many philosophers and linguists suggest that names are ‘just’ labels, but parents internationally are determined to get their children's names ‘right’. Personal names may be given, lost, traded, stolen and inherited. This collection of essays provides comparative ethnography through which we examine the politics of naming; the extent to which names may be property-like; and the power of names themselves, both to fix and to destabilize personal identity.
