Here's another pet peeve of mine: restaurants and hot spots that think they're so trendy they don't need a name. I passed this place on Great Jones Street that certainly looked like a restaurant, but I guess they didn't want anybody to know what its name was, like if the average schlub on the street were talking about the place by name, it would become that much less cool by association. Thou shalt not speaketh the secret name of the restaurant.... Which, come to think of it, is somewhat true. Knowing someone's — or some place's — name does take away some of its mystery, its incomprehensibility. It gives you the power to speak of it, to turn it into a referent.

Almost as irritating are places whose names defy all rules of pronouncability or that wind up being incomprehensible in the guise of creativity. I'm sure there's a rave somewhere called ? ("glottal stop", for the purists) or o6rj;a, and while I guess names like those give some insight into the character of the place, they're not all that illuminating.

All that being said, I think I'm gonna be a total jackass and change my own name to Umlaut. Or maybe ¨. Not Umlaut Harris. Just Umlaut, like Prince or Madonna, except it'll be Umlaut. When you think about it, it's not really all that out in left field, considering, for example, how Gwyneth Paltrow named her kid "Apple" and Michael Jackson named his unfortunate kid "Blanket." (Okay, that last one's a bad example.) If I had a kid, I'd name him or her Diaeresis — it's a gender-neutral name — because I hate kids.