I recently read some comments on an article about the Charleston shootings that were debating on whether the event should be called a hate crime or domestic terrorism. Yesterday, I was half-watching Daniel Boone at work. I saw how one of the characters was acting and I thought, “I bet he has multiple personality disorder.”

These two incidents are extremely different from each other. Indeed, it might seem strange that they are included together. The question that pulled them together in my mind was: What is in a name? Why must human beings always have names for everything?

One answer: order.

We give our children names so we can tell them apart and to help their identity along.

We name buildings and streets so we travel easier.

I acknowledge that knowing whether something was a hate crime or domestic terrorism will be important is sentencing the perpetrator, but I feel like a heinous crime does not necessarily need a specific name. It is a heinous crime no matter what it is.

I also acknowledge that psychiatry has progressed tremendously in the past few decades. No longer are mental disorders lumped into “nervous conditions” or “insanity.” And partly because of the new names and knowledge, mental asylums are the thing of the past. But when behaviors of children are constantly analyzed and given names, it makes me wonder if we are starting to over name parts of the human condition.

Is it possible to be overly “name happy?” or is right to categorize each and everything, let alone each and every person.