What’s in a name? Everything, it turns out. In our business, names and terminology are of paramount importance, I’m talking about names of gear, devices, cable, venues, local taverns and watering holes — and terms — think about how many terms relating to your job that you can come up with on a given day.
Names Matter
Yes, all names matter. And I am not just referring to human names too, although the first thing I do when a new team comes in my building and starts asking specific questions is, I ask names. And then I shake the hand of that person and repeat their name, while looking at them. Not because it’s the decent thing to do and not because I’m getting old (I am), but because we’re going to spend the next 24 hours (or maybe a week) together, and it’s just plain decency to speak someone’s name when acknowledging them. And if there’s an emergency, the last thing I want to be remembered for is yelling “Hey you — no, the other you!” Add to that the fact that you never know who is going to end up on your short list as someone who you might turn to in a pinch. You definitely don’t want to be saying “thanks for the spare cable, the data feed and — what was your name again?”
Specificity is important in this business. We deal with very absolute things that need to be put in very specific places. Signal in the right pipe, oops — correct signal in the right pipe. Thimble, shackle, steel, rope…whatever order your house requires, it’s in the name or acronym. Specifications are the first thing that occur when something that needs to be ‘built’ gets set into motion. We all tend to work from our general knowledge of what it is we do in order to get the job done, but long before we started to work, there was a set of specifications that outlined everything from the type of metal our screws were made out of to the way the concrete that we hung our points on had to be poured.
I know it sounds a little uptight, but these little details all add up, and it all starts with names. I once worked with a guy who thought that all Socapex had to be 208V (because “that’s what Socapex is,”he would say) and would constantly hook up 208V to any soco line he came across (because that’s how he was taught, perhaps?). Well, when prepping a rig that had everything from motor power to 208V to lower voltage stuff, this became a problem. Yes, we ran lower voltage stuff off of multi-channel cable because the cable’s name didn’t necessarily mean what kinds of voltage we ran down it! We had entire garbage pails full of Par cans that would have to get replaced because powering on the rig was always a great mystery (and, it turns out, pyro show!).
I once hooked up a projection show in a welding facility that had all kinds off power. Not just power I could use, but power for freaky, giant welding stations, which were unlike anything I’d ever seen. The electricians had no idea that plain old 110V AC was a thing. It took a little translation in order to get the point across, but in the end, everything worked out, and it was mostly because of names and recognition of what names of stuff mattered.
“No…the Other Sparky!”
Names of people can really get interesting in this industry, too. For a while there, it seemed like every person on the tour list in the middle of this magazine had a nickname. (Another Sparky — really?) And while I get that nicknames usually poke a little fun at a person’s physical attributes, personality, or habits, it gets a little annoying when every person ends up with a name “just because.” Luckily, I ended up with one of those names that can pass just as easily for a nickname as it can for my real one. I once worked with a guy in New York for close to two years and it was only when I was leaving town for good that he said “nice working with ya — what’s your real name anyway?” I always wondered though, if nicknames are more contrived for popularity than anything. I had a bud on the bus once who got “nicknamed” by everybody else during some late night party. “Dude, your new nickname is ‘Killer’” everyone said. “Yes — that’s exactly right. Dare to call me that, and that’s what I’ll become to you.”
I’ve also had plenty of times where I stumbled off the bus and walked in to the venue (name of state? No idea.) I’ve wondered aloud if I really needed to know the name of the place. Did it matter? It did during the pre-planning meeting — does it matter now? Yes, it always mattered. I always looked it up and read up on information about the place simply because I loved the history of the theaters I’ve visited. Not so much with the hotels and ballrooms, however. I couldn’t care less what the name of the empty ballroom staring at me was or is. Ballrooms don’t have souls, and most hotels don’t have histories. The good ones do, however, and you should look into their history should you grace their door. Anything called ‘The Willows’, ‘Blackstone’, or ‘Hermitage Isles’ is not worth remembering.
Nom de Gear
When it comes to gear, names were one of the first things I was drawn to when I started out. Words like Socapex, XLR, Feeder, and the DeMultiplexer (my fave), along with snoot, top hat, tweaker, gobo and brick — they just had a certain ring to them. And they sound exactly like what you would think they’d do. For one thing, you could keep up a conversation when talking shop at parties with non-Biz friends. “Yeah…this FNG started lowering the motor pick with the Soco HOD in it, and didn’t realize the whole thing was tied with a slip — drag!” (Names and terminology can also date you as well, and I realize that last sentence dates me in a way that can only be understood by the Elders, but I digress…)
Pronunciation seems to be all the rage today, though. It always makes me crazy when a tour comes through and I hear some well-meaning kiddo yell “grab that Soh-ka and pull it over the bat-ton!”. It always gives me pause because I wonder if they truly know where the name came from and what it means.
The name game really gets trying when you’re in a big meeting with all the creative heads and someone from the lighting team inadvertently uses the term “truss warmers” and instantly regrets it. Pretty soon every meeting thereafter has some version of that term in it and it starts to translate not to a specific thing, but to actual time and extra work on the gig. (Wait, maybe that’s a good thing.)
It was only when I got into the theater that I realized just how far down the rabbit hole you could go with names and terminology. Our business terminology and definition stretches back to the 6th century BC, and the modern stuff doesn’t even really start until the 1400’s, so the backlog of terms and their etymology is a bit hazy. There are a lot of important names out there and we can’t learn them fast enough.
