A naming situation captured in episodic formulae: how a publisher accepted his funder’s suggestion as to how to name his small press (and later found out the Italian word had been the name of a little dog that ketchup heiress used to have)

Abstract

Episodic formulae are a representational technique that emerged from artificial intelligence in order to capture the gist of situations and epistemic states in a narrative plot. Arguably, this formalism can be applied as well to complex situations of name-bestowing and evolving perceptions of the name adopted. In the situation we analyse with epistemic formulae in this paper, the Manhattan entrepreneur who had launched a literary magazine and then found a very affluent funder for also starting a book operation, expectably felt obliged to accept her suggestion of a name for his firm. At the time, in New York City he could be expected to find out easily that the name Ecco was the Italian adverb ecco for ‘here is…’ or ‘here you go’ and so forth. Eventually, he found out that the ketchup heiress who funded him had suggested to him the name of her beloved little dog that she once owned. This time, it was private knowledge, rather than available knowledge. One can figure out (from general patterns of how people feel or behave) that she wanted a memorial for her dog, and the publisher could be expected to have made sense of that once aware, but it also brought to the fore how their balance of power affected what she could afford vis-à-vis him. The set of formulae shown here illustrates the potential for onomastic research to develop a rigorous representation for situational constellations of name-bestowing and bearing a name that thus far it could explain just informally in narrative form.