Robyn Rishe was puzzled by a comment in my treatment of Oscar a few weeks back. She wrote:
“I am puzzled by your comment about today’s word, Oscar, that ‘like all proper nouns, it is a lexical orphan’. When I was in China, people often asked me what my name meant, because in Chinese all names have a meaning. I always assumed that somewhere way back in history, that was true of our names too. Otherwise, what are they? Random sounds?
“The comparison with Chinese brings up a second point—that you are ethnocentrically speaking of names with a European history only. What does Hillary Clinton’s name mean? Nothing, because it is European? What does Barak Obama’s name mean? I don’t know what its derivation is, but definitely not European. Does it mean something in another language? What does John McCain’s name mean? John goes back at least to Hebrew. Does it have a meaning there?”
The short answer to the question is, no, proper names do not have meaning in the sense common nouns have; they merely refer to objects. To understand this answer, however, we have to understand the difference between a word’s meaning and what it refers to.
When linguists use the term “meaning”, they usually have in mind a class of things, actions, or qualities associated with the word’s sound. Thus bird does not refer to one or two birds that hang around our back yard, but to an open-ended class of avians that differ significantly.
At the end of the 19th century Gottlob Frege demonstrated how the meaning of a word differs from what it refers to, its reference. His examples included the phrases morning star and evening star. These are, of course, two different phrases that have two different meanings. Morning and evening are different words with radically different meanings. However, they refer to the same thing: Venus—not even a star!
Now, if meaning and reference are distinct aspects of a word, then we should find words with meaning but no reference and words with reference but not meaning—at least, that would be ideal. Guess what? We find both.
Words with meaning but nothing to refer to include Martian, ghost, unicorn, gryphon, among many others. Most of us have a mental image of what a ghost is, but there is nothing in the real world for it to point to.
Words with references but no meanings include proper nouns. What is the meaning of Jim? Well, I know which person in my life it refers to but that person is not its meaning. I cannot answer the question, “What does a Jim look like?” “A Jim” makes no sense since Jims do not form a mental class like birds do. I can answer the question, “What does a bird look like?” That is because I have a concept of a class of bird objects.
Now, let’s get back to Oscar. I can answer the question, “What does an Oscar look like?” But my answer will be a description of the statuette, not a description of my Uncle Oscar. That is because Oscar® has become a common noun with the meaning “a statuette awarded for excellence in the motion picture making”. It now has a meaning and a reference, like all common nouns.
One final note for those who have waded this far with me. We should not confuse a word’s etymology with its meaning. The etymology of the name Cooper is that it comes from a word meaning “barrel-maker” and is based on the word hoop. However, “barrel-maker” is not the meaning of the name Cooper today because few if any Coopers make barrels. Cooper is a name without meaning even though it does have an etymology that leads to a word with meaning.