316 R I C H A R D C O AT E S

with human activity a type of object is, the more readily it seems able to acquire a proper name, though the systematic application of names to other categories is quite rare, and the degree of intimacy with which something is felt to be associated with human activity may vary from culture to culture.

Everyone will have noted that some objects in classes not generally bearing names are occasionally named. In my experience of literature or real life I have come across a mandolin named Antonia, a steam-powered dildo called Steely Dan, a diamond called Koh-i-Noor, a child’s chair called Fifi, a bell called Great Tom, windmills called Jack and Jill, a dishwasher called Oscar, a tree called The Major Oak, lottery machines called Arthur and Guinevere, and a streetcar named Desire. Many of these are transferred from the set of primordial names: personal names. The very nature of properhood (cf. Section 6.1.1), a conversational device for promoting maximally successful individual reference in context whilst cancelling any linguistic senses or implicatures of the expressions used, means that any individual ‘thing’ of any category may in principle bear a proper name, so whether any of the namings in this paragraph causes surprise has to do with whether they uphold or violate cultural expectation, and not with the linguistic nature of names.

Some particular name may be traditionally associated with one category of things. But it would be simplistic to regard a name form as in itself (e.g.) a personal name. Dr Syntax was a character invented by the writer William Combe. His versified exploits were very popular in the early 1800s and a famous racehorse, twice winner of the Preston Gold Cup, was named after him. A pub in Preston bears the name of the horse. Items that began as place-names may become surnames and then personal names (Shirley, Tracy, Everton); place-names may be adaptations of names for persons (Telford, Peterlee, Washington). A linguistic string has a default interpretation as a proper name, but it follows from that that its intended referenttype needs to be inferred in the context of usage, which includes participants’ personal experience of naming. But from the linguistic point of view a name is just a name, with limitless applicability in principle.

Any proper name may come to be used as a common noun or in a common expression (cardigan, sandwich, john, dobermann, (baked) alaska, (eau de) cologne, china). This may happen through a trope by which an object is associated with a named individual, and by its subsequent taking-on of that individual’s name; the trope is seen nakedly in Amsterdam is the Venice of the North, but in this case the name has not been borrowed – Venice has not come to have ‘Amsterdam’ among its meanings. In the case of wellingtons, the type of boots associated with the first Duke of Wellington came to be known as Wellington boots and then wellington boots, and by conversational omission of the generic, wellingtons (and latterly wellies). This process may be paralleled in cases where the name has been bestowed, rather than being produced conversationally, as with the common nouns denoting sizes of champagne bottle which are applications of