Names, to me, are mag­i­cal. I know I’ve talked about this before: about how a person’s name becomes so much more than a sim­ple noun to sig­nify their exis­tence. It sum­mons and sig­ni­fies, cures and curses. I was stymied at first when I real­ized that, despite their magic, given names are used less the more we come to love or hate a per­son. It seemed counter-intuitive, ini­tially. When you love a song, for exam­ple, you search for it on the radio. When you love a food, you learn how to quickly make or buy it. How­ever, the more inti­mate you are with a per­son — either pos­i­tively or neg­a­tively — the less you use their given name, or even pri­mary, well-known nick­names. Bar­ring the times we are engaged in con­ver­sa­tion with or around mere acquain­tances, strangers, or peo­ple to whom our rela­tion­ships are irrel­e­vant or even poten­tially prob­lem­atic, we rarely call par­ents, chil­dren, spouses or lovers by any­thing more than a nick­name. We point with pro­nouns. Our exis­tence has become con­text to our loved ones, and ours to them: each beloved per­son is some­thing under­stood with­out words, and some­thing that word­lessly defines the bound­aries of those who love them. It is no won­der, then, that names are so pow­er­ful, for they sum­mon That Which Can­not Be Con­tained In A Name.