You're listening to Away with Words.

I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Barnett.

Recently, my friend Jane bought a mini-Cooper.

It's this really cute little car.

It's black and beige.

But you know what?

She doesn't call it my car.

She always, always refers to this car as the pug. And it sort of looks like one.

It's little and cute. It's got the same coloring. And Grant, that got me to thinking about why so

many of us tend to bestow names on certain inanimate objects in our lives. Do you do that?

I do, but it's only when the thing itself asked me to.

What? Are you hearing voices? They're speaking to me. The dog, the meter. What do you mean? No, if you buy a new computer and you go through the install process, there's a point at which it says, name this computer. And usually it defaults to something like Grant Barrett's computer, which is kind of blah, right?

Uh-huh.

So I tend to name those things after words that have caught my attention recently.

So my current computer is named Utterly, U-T-E-R-L-Y.

What?

I just liked the way utterly that adverb came from another word having something to do with

speech,

but now it's kind of used to mean to the limit or to the max.

Of course.

You named your computer utterly.

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