Name It to Tame It
» The limits of your inner language are the limits of your inner world «
A while back, I read an intriguing essay by Zoe Scaman titled The Naming of Things. In it, she argues that the words and metaphors we use for a phenomenon shape our relationship to it. The names we settle on quietly influence what we believe a thing is, what we allow it to do, what responsibilities we attach to it, and what possibilities we can even perceive.
Zoe makes this case using AI and large language models. Are they tools? Assistants? Collaborators? Interfaces? Minds? Each label carries its own assumptions about capability, agency, trust, responsibility, and control. A name is never neutral. It frames the relationship before the relationship even begins.
She is fundamentally right. But the idea reaches further than technology.
The same principle applies inwardly.
The words we use for our own experiences quietly shape our relationship to ourselves. What remains unnamed stays vague and atmospheric. A drifting discomfort. A recurring tension. A heaviness without edges. But once something is named, it changes character. It becomes graspable. It turns from weather into an object. Something you can return to, examine, question, and perhaps even change.
This idea is older than psychology.
In the Grimm tale, Rumpelstiltskin loses his power the moment his name is spoken. In Egyptian mythology, Isis gains dominion over Ra after learning his true name. In A Wizard of Earthsea, magic itself is rooted in true names. To know the name of a thing is to know its nature. Across cultures and centuries, the same pattern keeps appearing: naming creates a strange form of power.
Modern neuroscience hints at something similar. A 2007 UCLA brain-scan study, replicated many times since, showed that putting a feeling into words calms the brain’s alarm system and engages the part that thinks things through.1 The lived experience matches the brain data: naming a feeling makes it easier to carry.
What you cannot name, you cannot properly hold.
And what you cannot hold tends to hold you instead.
It’s like a monster in the dark. Naming the monster weakens it. Not because the monster disappears, but because it moves into a room where you can finally face it.
There’s an echo of all of this in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous line:
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
That’s the principle I call Name It to Tame It. Before anything in your interior can be tended, examined, released, or grown into something else, it has to be given a name. To name it is to conceptualize it. To name it is to give it a handle. But to name it is even more than that. It is to accept it. To embrace it. Until something has a name, it’s Schall und Rauch — sound and smoke.2 After it is named, it can be worked with.
The most practical example is the stalled task. An item that’s been on your to-do list for weeks. Months. You keep moving it forward, never doing it. The usual suspects — laziness, lack of time — aren’t the cause. The task as written doesn’t name what’s actually there. Vagueness has no handles. The brain skips what it can’t grip. That’s why rewriting a stalled task often dissolves it. You sit with it. You ask what it’s really asking of you. You give it a sharper name. Once the name fits, your hand can find it.3
Much of what I do on this Substack is coining terms and conceptualizing things. Arcs of Aspiration named a layer of life-design that goals don’t reach. The Triple E Game Plan split execution into the three modes it actually contains. The exact terms I land on don’t matter. The things behind them do.
Some of the names you need will be your own, coined for whatever nobody else’s vocabulary quite captures. Others will be borrowed, found in books and conversations that handed you a handle just when you needed one. Both kinds work.
Across the thirty chapters of my book Scale-Smart Productivity, I have named about a hundred such patterns. Some are coined, some borrowed, some old terms with their meaning sharpened. Anomie. Borderlands. Effort Scoping. Friction Pruning. The engagement vs. execution split.
The book is a catalog of handles for the things that most reliably slip. It is on Leanpub, pay-what-you-want. Bring your own monsters.
Lieberman, M. D., et al. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428.
From Goethe’s Faust. Faust tells Gretchen to call the divine whatever name she likes — Glück, Herz, Liebe, Gott: happiness, heart, love, God. The specific label is interchangeable: Schall und Rauch, sound and smoke. But Faust still offers four names. The essay’s claim is the part Faust leaves implicit: the exact label may be vapor, but having a label is what gives a thing edges.
I’ve written more on the mental visibility of tasks — what makes one item on a list actionable and another invisible — in Selective Task Management.