Hello, My Name Is
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Just rolling up into Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Lulu Miller. Hey, I'm Latif Nasser. So Latif, we're going to begin today. See a big gray water tower? In the middle of barn country in Wisconsin. Okay. Some cheese to bring home to the family. And I'd gone out there. Oh, just overshot the fire department. Because I wanted to go to a fire station. Sun Prairie Fire Department.

Okay. Very excited. Where I wanted to meet a very special firefighter. Okay. Thank you for letting me come by. I really appreciate it. He fought fires for over 30 years. 31 years in the department, but gone since 2018. Okay.

Saved countless lives. Got on my hands and knees and I crawled all the way up to her door. She was indeed trapped right in the doorway with an inner wheelchair. And the reason I was there... Got her out to safety there. Wow. Did you talk to him? Besides him being a hero. Wasn't because he was a hero. Not because he's a hero. No. I was there because of his name.

What's his name? This man who has valiantly risked his life in making there be less fire burning. Less burning, yes. Yep, you can say that. His name is? Without further ado, what is your name? My name is Les McBurney. Les McBurney. No. Yep.

Oh, it's just destiny. There's no other. His name is Les McBurney. Les McBurney. And yes, when I heard this, like it just warmed my cold little heart. I couldn't stop laughing.

Like thinking about it and chuckling to myself, texting people, Les McBurney, there's a fireman named Les McBurney, Les McBurney. Like it just was bottomlessly joyful to me. And apparently too many people on the Internet. He was recently a couple of years back. He was on TV for fighting a fire at 3 a.m. And someone took a still of the TV shot where it was like Lieutenant Firefighter Les McBurney. And it just became this huge meme.

We're gonna start in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. This gentleman is-- - Goes on Jimmy Kimmel. - Les McBurney. - Les McBurney. - Oh, wow. - As a perfectly named human. - Les McBurney would also be a good name for a urologist.

But kind of fun. I mean, it's just, you know, if that's my 15 seconds of fame, okay. You know, if mine, in fact, there is a fire department in Texas that has a big, huge blow-up mascot, and they actually named it after me. I don't know.

Wait, what? Yeah, I saw it on the internet. What is it? What's the mascot? Is it your face? No, it's not my face. It's just like a big, huge Smokey the Bear kind of thing. You know, a big, huge blow-up thing. With a big mustache and a fire hat, blue eyes, just like him. And they put Les McBurney on it. Oh!

That's amazing. Yeah. So, I mean, like I said, if it helps with fire prevention, it helps anybody, that's what it's all about. But, you know, I drove nearly three hours to go stand next to this guy. Yeah, why did you do that? Because I think names have power. I don't think they are just static labels that we wear. I think that they have the ability to shift things.

what's possible for us to shift what we become in small but real ways. And I wanted to talk to Les about that. I wanted to kind of go deep with how maybe his name influenced what he became. Well, do you think it had any subtle, insidious effect on you becoming a firefighter? No. He was like, no, not at all.

He never noticed it? No. How is that even possible?

Did anyone ever, like, rib you about it? Not a person. He never got teased as a kid. No school counselor was ever like, you know what you should do? Become a firefighter. And even when he did become a firefighter. It never got mentioned in probably 25 years. Like the firefighters at the station? Okay, did you notice the name before it went viral? They never thought about it. No, no one put two and two together until that came out. It was hilarious. I mean, this other firefighter was like, I noticed.

Yes, I did, and I had no clue how nobody else had picked up on it yet. I don't know how they didn't notice. Seriously, you guys didn't notice his name is Les McBurney? Okay. I still, I guess, I don't get it. I mean, I don't, honestly. I mean, yeah, my name's Les McBurney. I'm a firefighter. Okay. I mean, it's just what it is.

However, despite Les McBurney's attempts to douse my fire for the idea that names hold great power... I feel like it was inevitable that you would leave Les McBurney, Les aflame. But today we are doing a whole show that delves into the power of names. Stories where names do shape lives. Or change the way we think. Stories of people fighting against names. Or having to reclaim a name. And the potential power...

of remaining nameless. So hold on to your names, folks. Or let them go. Either way, here we go. Okay, so let's kick things off talking about names, not of people, but of things, because obviously we love to run around and look at everything and name it. We especially like to name things after ourselves. Look at this pretty river. I shall call it the Hudson River, said Henry Hudson. That was a very good Henry Hudson impression. Yeah.

But still, you're right. It's like a power move. And it's like even literally even inside our body, things are named after other people. Like it's like the fallopian tubes or like the Broca's area of the brain or like. Fallopian was, sorry, fallopian was a person? Yeah, fallopian. Hold on. I'll look it up. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Gabriela Fallopio, an Italian Catholic priest. Oh, wow.

Yeah. 1523 to 1562. Wow. Yeah. And it's almost always a European white guy, right? Yeah. Like our most intimate parts are like colonized by these names. Yeah. That's, of course, it's a very colonial idea. The idea of claiming by naming. Hmm.

But I can't remember the last time that anyone named a cell or a body part after themselves or the person who discovered it. So there's no Mukherjee elbow in the future? There will unfortunately be no Mukherjee elbow. I'm still going to call it Mukherjee's elbow.

So our next story comes from this guy, Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee. I'm glad you chose the elbow because the elbow is very neutral, actually. He's a professor of medicine at Columbia University. And I ended up talking to him because our reporter, Carolyn McCusker, pulled me into the studio with him. Okay, Carolyn, you want to take it? Yeah, sure. Yeah, I wanted to talk to Siddhartha because he talks about how back in the 1800s,

there was really no consensus at all for how to name diseases. Yeah. So in medicine, no one created a taxonomy. No one said, this is the way we're going to name things. So it's a free for all. And so he kind of, he tells a story, which is kind of like two stories about this disease that got named and how the choice of naming totally changed how people imagined the disease. Right.

Yeah. So let's start on a March evening in 1845. There's a Scottish physician. His name is Bennett. John Hughes Bennett. And he's called in urgently to see a man who's dying mysteriously.

The patient is a 28-year-old man. He's a slate layer. A stone worker. And Bennett writes about this case. He says he's of dark complexion, unusually healthy. Except he writes that... 20 months ago, this patient was affected with a great listlessness on exertion.

And over the next few months, he started getting really sick with abdominal pains and fevers and... These tumors are growing all over this man's body, in his armpits, his groin and his neck. So when this man shows up to his office... Bennett draws a drop of blood and he finds that the blood is full of millions of white blood cells.

Now, the idea of cells was pretty much brand new back then. But for doctors at the time, white blood cells basically just mean pus. And so when Bennett sees all of these white blood cells in the blood, he thinks, OK, that's pus, which means that... That this man has an infection. And then he names the disease. Yeah, he gives it a name. He calls it a suppuration of blood. Suppuration.

Subpuration means the formation of pus in the blood. And that case report and that name sort of set the stage for how a lot of doctors approach this mysterious disease. When you call something a subpuration of blood, you're saying in a hidden way, you're saying, I know what the answer is. It's pus. And if it's pus, then it must be infection.

Like a hidden judgment about the cause of it? Exactly. It's a hidden judgment about the cause. And so as other patients were showing up with similar symptoms and these explosions of white blood cells in their blood...

Doctors were looking for little bacteria or something to have caused this infection, but nobody was able to figure it out. And they all kind of ended up right where Bennett was, just not knowing what to do for his patient. Yeah, so Bennett's patient, his disease accelerates, and we know from Bennett's case description that he dies very soon. Oh, wow. Which brings us to story number two. This is now some months after Bennett saw his patient. ♪

In Berlin, there's a young medical student named Rudolf Virchow. And he also sees a patient. This time, it's a cook. It's, I think, a 50-year-old woman. She started to have these nosebleeds and a lot of the other same symptoms that Bennett's patient had. And Virchow, just like Bennett, takes a look at her blood.

You know, he picks up a drop of blood and sees, again, millions and millions of white blood cells. Now, Virchow, unlike Bennett... Virchow is extremely young, far from an experienced physician. He's fresh out of medical school, and Siddhartha says he was pretty distressed with what he was learning there. All these theories about the four humors, hysteria, anxiety.

He was feeling like none of that stuff made any sense. You know, he writes this very beautiful letter back to his father. And he says, true knowledge is only obtained by knowing what you don't know. And he says, how much and how painfully do I feel the gaps in my knowledge? Hmm.

And so when Virchow goes to give this disease a name... He almost, it's like an, it's sort of an act in the negative. He's like, I'm not going to imply that I know anything about it. I'm just going to say what I see. Just what it looks like. And so he says, his first call is Weiss's Blut. Which is just German for white blood. Just white blood. But in a later paper, he goes on to translate that name into Greek to call the disease... Leukemia.

I have heard of that. Yeah. I should say it would be another 40 or 50 years before scientists pin down what we know today, which is that the disease is not an infection. This Weiss's Blut is in fact a cancer of white blood cells. But Siddhartha's argument is that a name like leukemia that doesn't have an assumption baked in, it kind of allows your mind to wander and...

And this is around the same time that people are finding cancers in the liver. They're finding cancers in the stomach and the brain and other parts. So what's really genius about Virchow's name is that it allows people to bring these ideas together, like a mysterious disease and new ideas in the field, like the idea of cancers and cells growing out of control and lead to finally understanding what leukemia was.

I love this idea that when you're not sure what's what, maybe a name that's going to provide you a more sort of durable clue through shifting beliefs. It's just a description. It's just what you see. Is the idea here like...

that's always going to be a sounder way to name things? Like we should, that's a way to kind of excise our hubris out of the naming process? I think that's the, I think that was Mukherjee's argument. Yeah. To not know, to not be able to name, to not have names that imply causes, it cleans up the field because then people can really think about things in ways that may not be known before. Yeah.

And so more and more as we edge towards the 18th and 19th century, people think of names as descriptive, what I would call a, you know, a Virchow kind of system. The tradition of naming things based on description alone. We still use that word, the word leukemia. They still remain as sort of like memories of this very rich but somewhat forgotten history.

You're steering me right into the territory I'm passionate about because my sister Alexa has dedicated her life to working with doctors, encouraging them not to name a sickness or an ailment for like five seconds longer than they usually do. Her whole life

work is in showing people that if you like just wait a moment before you slap a diagnosis on something, if you stay in that uncertainty place that Mukherjee talks about, like if you stay there for two more minutes, if you ask the patient a couple more questions, if you ask a nurse or family member for them to weigh in, you just...

wait a second longer it increases diagnostic skills it reduces error like people anyway and I that her work I mean she's been doing this for 20 years and it it has huge like it's probably one of the most influential things in in how I see the world that like the rush to name even if it's a better name like that actually when we can just wait that we can halt for a second like

There can be value there. So in the effort of not rushing into our next story, you know, to really get gain more insight, we're going to take a break here. We'll come back on the other side. Maybe we won't come back on the other side. Maybe naming is pointless and we, you know.

There are no stories of names left. Or maybe we will be back with great stories that will blow your mind. And you should keep listening. Hang around and wait to find out. Yeah. Hey, listeners. This is Alex Neeson. I'm the editor for this episode. I wanted to take a moment to thank you.

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I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

Lulu. Latif. Radiolab. We're talking about names. And the next story is actually about an unnaming. As you know, we are in a moment in this country where there are a lot of things like

and monuments that are being unnamed or renamed. This is a story like those from the front lines of that battle, but it's like an inside-out version of it. And it begins with a young woman named Ira Lynn McBride. Okay, great. Okay, so...

2017. In Southern Pines, North Carolina. It is her first day of high school. Her cousin is actually driving her to school in the morning. And my cousin parks in the auditorium parking lot. They cut through the parking lot. Walking to our school, like our classes. Get on the sidewalk that leads to campus. Excited. Seeing all my teachers and other students. The sidewalk starts to

curve around this big brick building, the auditorium. And... Ira Lynn says it was right then. I just looked up. And she saw up at the very top of this building were these big black letters that said Robert E. Lee Auditorium.

Ouch. Yeah. Okay. And so, so Ireland is black. She also knows enough history to know. The Confederate general, like, is this us? Is that our school? You know? And, um, I was so many mixed emotions. It was angry, sad, scared. Like, it was just all together. I really didn't know how to feel. So instead of, you know, um,

Going off of my emotions, I wanted to get information. So she decides on her first day of high school, she marches up to the principal's office. I really did. I went straight to my principal's office. And just asks the principal, like, So can you tell me more about this? Because I'm kind of confused.

Kind of feeling a little wheezy about it. Wow. That confidence, right? Oh, Ireland. So. What's the principal say? Principal tells her. He basically told me that it wasn't the Confederate general. Common mistake. But actually, the auditorium is named after a former school superintendent who just so happened to also be named Robert E. Lee. Wait, did she buy that?

But it's, I mean, it's true. His name was also Robert Edward Lee. So the auditorium was not at all named for the Confederate general. It was named for this other guy for this other reason. Huh. And that was about it. He was just like, yeah, don't worry. It's not the Confederate general. There's nothing to be scared of. And what, how did, what did you make of that? I,

thought, I was like, whoa, it was a very, it was a good eye opener. It calmed me down a little bit. But then I was like, if I'm thinking that this is the Confederate general, then everyone else has to be thinking this too, you know, no one actually sat us down and talked to us about it. So we're all kind of in the blue. So Ira Lynn just sort of takes all of that. And for the rest of this

year, school year, like, you know, every morning she's walking into school past that sign. She is doing all girls choir, choir rehearsals, plays and orchestra band in the auditorium. And I just didn't like it. It didn't sit well with me. She said that like if it was up to her, I probably wouldn't have performed under it, but I had no choice but to perform in the auditorium. Because even if it is a different Robert E. Lee audition,

You know, that name is just so heavy. It's just... It's something, you know? Yeah, it's like that first... I don't know, when you first said, oh, it's named after someone else, you have a moment of like, oh, okay, phew. But then it does kind of curdle where you're like...

is this a way to still have the name but have a perfect defense against the calls to change it? Or like, it's like a weird immunity justification. Yeah, like a shield. Okay, we'll get to that. We'll get to that. Okay, sorry. So cut to the next year. Okay. Ira Lynn is in Speech and Debate. And the category that I was in was...

I forgot the name of the category. But it's basically when you just recite a speech that someone's already given. And I did the Martin Luther King Montgomery bus boycott speech. And she just nails it. And afterwards, she gets approached by another student. Sure. So I'm Luke D'Azio. He's a year ahead of her. He's white.

And he seems to be the only other student at Pinecrest that cares about the name of the auditorium. It's just sort of kind of glaring to see Robert E. Lee Auditorium. And so Luke was also in the film club. I mean, it's like four students that met in a room. And he decided he wanted to make a documentary about the auditorium.

So he interviewed a bunch of students, tracked down the superintendent's family. They told me about this really good book. Tracked down this obscure book about the history of Moore County schools, and then wrote and directed this doc. I tried to do the voiceover at the beginning by myself, but I don't always have the most varied speaking style. Then he saw Ira Lynn give this speech. And I was like, she would be perfect for this. I was so excited. She was like, yeah, I'll narrate it. Let's do this.

In Moore County, North Carolina, Southern Pines, Pinecrest High School has an auditorium named after Robert E. Lee.

But it's not what you'd expect. So it's about 20 minutes long. It's on YouTube called Robert E. Lee, Not That One. And so what you see in the documentary are two things. Okay. So first... We interviewed 191 Pinecrest students. They go and they give out this survey. During third and fourth lunch on April 2nd, 2019. They ask a few questions, but essentially they're like, who is this auditorium named for? And what they find is that... One third of students wrote that they didn't know why it was named that way.

A third of the students have no idea. One third of students thought that it was named after the Confederate general. A third thought general. And then they got a handful of answers that were like very high school answers, the high schooliest of answers you can imagine. Like what? Somebody wrote on the paper, what did that person do? First person to eat ass. Um...

They never let you down. The high schoolers never let you down. But the big kicker is the last question, true or false, the name of the auditorium makes you feel unwelcome. We found that 18.8% said that it made them feel unwelcome.

And our school is about a fifth to, it's around a fifth black. So 20%. So not, maybe not a coincidence. Yeah. So that was one thing that's in this documentary. And then there's another thing in the documentary, which is that... My father came from Virginia. He was born in Isle of Wight County and the town was Franklin, Virginia. It becomes a little profile of Superintendent Robert E. Lee, who actually went by Bob.

So I'm just going to call him Bob. Bobby Lee. So perfectly, ironically, not only was Bob Lee...

not a Confederate general. He was actually at the forefront of the issue of racial integration of Moore County schools. Whoa. In what era? So 1960s post-Brown v. Board of Education. But one of the biggest simplifications I think they teach in history class is that Brown v. Board happened and then all the schools were desegregated. But in the South, there were a lot of schools that

that just straight up refused to do so. - And North Carolina was one of those places. But what you learn in the documentary is when Bob became superintendent in 1959, what he would do was he would go visit his students. - He would come home and be very quiet. - And he would see like the black students living in just extreme poverty. - Because he would go in homes where there were dirt floors. - And to him, desegregation, you know, he realized that like this was the right thing

thing to do. He thought education was an equalizer. Before the federal government forced them to. So he got ahead of it. And in this documentary, his kids would talk about, you know, when he would go downtown. People would walk across the street not to speak to him. White people would just avoid him on the street. He would walk into a shop. They all faced the wall and some took papers and pretended they were reading the paper and faced the wall.

And his daughter actually told a story about how one night she was in bed. Daddy came up to me and said, I don't want you to worry. But if something happens outside, outside the house, in the yard, basically, if there were to be a cross burning, I want you to go to this closet and don't come out to hear my voice.

But he saw it through, and he integrated the schools of Moore County. They were one of the first in North Carolina to actually receive a certificate of desegregation. And so, you know, like...

Hearing all this, you get it. You say, okay, this is a person worth honoring. You know, maybe something should be named after him. Totally. Yeah, good dude. I mean, but just not that name. I know. It's his name that is the issue. Anyway, at a certain point of reporting, I was just like, I need to talk to someone who was on the inside of the naming. Okay.

Oh, yeah. Like, how did you name it that? And did you talk about this at all? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so we found someone who herself— Look at this and see if this is doing right. She was a teacher-turned-school board member who has a terrific name herself. Player McFall. Player McFall. Great, right? Yeah. Player's white, by the way. How did you get on that school board? What was your background before that? Uh—

Well, radical leftist. So back when she was a teacher, she was actually the faculty advisor of the NAACP chapter. And then after she retired in the late 80s, she joined the school board. So she was on the school board at the time when they named that auditorium. So we called her up and we're like, what? Like, what happened there? How does the issue of a name come up or the idea of a name come up? I mean, auditoriums don't even always have names. You know, we love our names. I mean, everybody.

And Bob had just done so much for the county. And he was such a force of nature. Player said, for example, when Bob integrated the school's

There was basically a white school in one part of the county, black school in another part of the county. And oddly enough, imagine this, none of the white kids wanted to go to the black school. And so what Bob did was instead of moving one to the other, the other to the other, and busing and doing all these things that are so controversial, he's like, let's amalgamate. Let's make a whole new school, a really good school, the best school that anybody's ever seen in this area. And...

everyone's going to come to this new school. So literally new building, new place? Exactly. And he didn't even, like the school board there, they didn't have the money for this new school. So they built it piece by piece by piece. He wanted it open, even if it didn't have a cafeteria or...

Or an auditorium. I mean, the kids had to eat out of vending machines for years. Like through the 60s. And then they built a cafeteria. Oh, and a smoking area. And then eventually a school gym. And the last piece of this new school that gets built was the auditorium.

And the auditorium wasn't until 1990 gets made just a few years after he retires. And Mary Lou, who is a contemporary of mine, his daughter, she said that this was the final thing for her daddy. You know, I mean, and we we all kind of felt like finally Pinecrest has what all the other schools had. But he had just done so much. We wanted his name on it.

And his name was Robert E. Lee. And we knew Robert E. Lee could be, you know, what people would think of the general. But as local Moore County people, we were talking about Superintendent Bob Lee. And I think...

We didn't care. We wanted to name it for Bob Lee. Right, right. But like, for instance, like, like it wasn't named Superintendent Bob Lee or whatever else. Like, because it felt like just his full name was more distinguished or something kind of thing. Because we even talked about that. I remember we did talk about it and everybody said, no, the man's name is Robert E. Lee. And I think it goes back really and truly to,

recognizing that people could think it was named for the general, but just not having an awareness that that could be devastating to someone. And, you know, I think if we could do that in 1990 with people like me on the school board thinking that I was very progressive, I mean, that's, you talk about white privilege, right?

Yeah, right. In a way, it's like the privilege to not have to think about this name as a hurtful name in a way. To choose not to think about it. Yeah. It's just one of those things that because we knew him, we thought, well, nobody will care. You know, surely it's 1990. People aren't going to consider that we named it for the general.

Surely we're beyond that. I've actually had a couple of conversations with students like me that they felt scared in a way. Not only were they scared, but they felt like dis... What's the word? They felt disrespected. Just straight disrespected. And, you know, they were mad because they couldn't really do anything or they thought that they couldn't do anything about it. So...

It's near the end of the year, finals week. Luke is spending his nights... Working on this documentary into the wee hours of the morning. He gets it done right before finals end. And, you know, after the school finished testing, like, we would watch Jumanji or, like, Finding Nemo or High School Musical. But he asks the principal, could we show this documentary instead? And the principal says, sure. So they screen this documentary for the students at the end of the year. And after the movie, a lot of students start coming up to Luke and saying...

So are you going to try to get the name changed? Because this is 2019 and just, you know, two years before. M&M!

Statues of Robert E. Lee were in the national spotlight. The monuments have become a focal point of protests. Being vandalized or even pulled down in Charlottesville, in New Orleans, in Richmond. And Luke was like, I get it. It's important that if you're walking on the campus for the first time, you don't feel immediately alienated.

So he went around... Collected petitions. ...to change the name of the auditorium. And then... So I need a motion to approve the work session agenda. Second. He went in front of the school board. He showed the film, gave them the petitions. After that, the principal, faculty, school board, the superintendents, family members, all of them started talking about what they should do. Like...

how do you continue to honor this man? Is the best way to pay tribute to him actually paradoxically to take his name off of the thing? Or is there a way to change it? And so, you know, some people suggested they should call it Bob, you know, Superintendent Bob O'Connor.

or something. But the current superintendent, his name was also Bob. And supposedly he didn't want people to think he was naming it after himself. And then the family, they seem to prefer R.E. Lee because that's how their dad used to sign his name. And so finally, after all this negotiation...

They just took down the name Robert E. Lee Auditorium, and in its place they put R. E. Lee Auditorium. That's what we ended up with. And I felt like, you know, that was an improvement.

And I was sort of hoping for a bit more of a radical change to the sign, but I didn't let perfect be the enemy of the good. So I do think that they changed it to Ari Lee and there are still going to be people thinking that it's the Confederate general. I think they should have changed it to Bob Ely since that was, you know, a name that he used often. But, you know, a change is a change. Yeah.

One step at a time. Yeah. I wonder for you, like having worked on this project in a way, like being a part of the thing that made that change, right. That, that, that changed that name. Um, and then seeing right now across the whole country, across the whole world, really, um, this is, there's a similar thing happening, right. Um, I wonder what do you make of that?

I'm just happy that, you know, I was able to be a part of that change, even though it might have been a small one to some because, you know, it's only our school and it's only our district. It makes me want to be a part of the change that is about to happen. Like, I feel like there is a change going to happen sooner or later. It just makes me think that

It's, I don't know. It makes me think that I'm not alone. It makes me think that there are other people out there that want the change and they're going for it. You know? Radiolab, we'll be back in a moment.

Hello, my name is Aaliyah McKee, and I'm calling from the beautiful borough of Brooklyn, New York. I'm a member of Radiolab's exclusive membership program, The Lab. My membership provides Radiolab with a steady source of funding so the team can continue to tell stories about our crazy world. And I get access to exclusive live events and bonus content. Join me in supporting the show we love. Sign up at Radiolab.org.

slash join.

I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, Lulu, Radio Lab, when we left off, we were talking about slowing the process of naming, waiting a beat before you name. But now just to switch things up, let's cram as many names into one second as we can. Giddy up. We're off to the races, baby. Courtesy of reporter Annie McKeown. Okay. I guess, first of all, what do you think about horses? Like, what are your thoughts? Do you like them? Do you not like them? I like them.

I have no particular strong feelings about horses. Right. Yeah, why? No, I think just because I have such a deep love for them and I'm so blinded by that love, I just assume that you are also in love with them because I can't see outside of that. But I think most people are not. Most people are like, huh, cool. Yeah.

Yeah. Maybe knights used to ride them. How neat. How neat. Yeah. Like maybe a friend's kid takes horseback riding lessons or something. Yeah. You're like, what a little dweeb. Yeah. Anyway. So that used to be me. Okay. Growing up, I was a big time horse girl. Okay. Great. And I was especially obsessed with horse racing. I wanted to be a jockey, all that. But a thing that always kind of puzzled me about horse racing was what these horses were often named.

And, you know, racehorse names, I think it's pretty well known that they can be kind of wacky, like Z-Biscuit or Tabasco Cat. Or sometimes they're just like these random phrases like, forgot my shoes or that's show business. But what I didn't fully realize is how much some of these names sound like they were written by a middle school boy. Is this going on? Is this really going on the radio? Yeah. Oh.

Okay. This is retired racetrack announcer Tom Durkin. I called the Kentucky Derby a number of times and the Breeders' Cup 23 times and in total maybe 80 or 100,000 races. It was enough. That is so many races. Yeah. For 40-some years, Tom was the guy who stood up in a glass box above the stands with binoculars trained on the racing horses below calling out all flavors. Um,

Of horse names. Let's see. Well, there was a horse called Bodacious Tatas. Okay. Nice. Titular Feast. Uh-huh. Colder than a witch's. There was a horse in France called Big Tits. Yeah. Just saying it like it is. Big Tits. Yeah. Yeah. There's G-Spot. Peonies. You know, like the flower peony. Uh-huh. Peonies Envy. Nice. There's Pussy Galore. Sock.

Thock Tucker. Tucker. Okay. Oh, another one named Cunning Stunt. Okay. That you could really screw it up. Which Tom says was actually sometimes the point. This guy, Cesar Kimmel, had these horses and he named them. He really tried to cross me up a number of times. What do you mean? Like he's trying to make you, the announcer, stumble? Yes, ma'am. No way.

Like she sells seashells by the seashore or something? Yeah, that's actually one of them. She sells seashells. No. Yeah, that was a harness horse I had to call. Or another one. Flat fleet feet. Flat fleet feet. Flat fleet. Yeah. Not nice. There was a horse called Doremi Fasolatido. Doremi Fasolatido. There's one that's just the letter A and then a bunch of

Arr is after? Arr. That one's funny. And another... A horse called Yaka Hicka Mika Dola. Oh, my gosh. Total gibberish as far as I know. Wow. So... Yeah. Why do... Like, why? Why do people name their horses like this? Yes. I don't know why. But according to an interview I found with historian Philip Sidnell...

It's possible that it's just always been this way. There were these chariot races back in ancient Rome. Ben-Hur. Ben-Hur, exactly. Super dangerous, super dramatic. And the names of these horses, because they were important, they were written down. And even back then, when I would assume their names would be something like Golden Glory. Yeah, or like Hermes or something. Yeah, right. But instead they had names like Chatterbox.

And there was one just named Snotty, like snot from your nose. I mean, we're talking about around the same time in human history when Jesus Christ was walking the earth. And people are naming famous horses after the mucus that drains from a nostril. I don't know. I personally feel like they could have tried a little harder. But anyway, I also learned that

Potentially the most famous war horse of all time. This beautiful, powerful, gray-white stallion from 11th century Spain, medieval Spain. This horse is the stuff of legends, folk songs. There are statues in Spain of this horse. This horse's name was Babieca. And I thought that's like a nice name. That, you know, could be Babieca. But translated to English, Babieca means stupid.

It just means stupid. So, one could say naming a horse Bodacious Tatas is just tradition. Anyway, back to Tom. Yeah, let's roll. Because people can and do name their horses pretty much anything they please. But Tom's the guy who has to say those names. Yeah, that's work, baby. That's work. And he's up there in that glass box on race day.

And they're off! Squinting through binoculars as he follows the horses around the track. On the outside, it's Akalina. On the rail, it's Sweet over Melissa. Between those two is Doremi Fasolatido. Doing his best to get these names right, even when some of them are meant to trip him up. Around the far turn, and the leader is Sweet over Melissa. By ahead, Doremi Fasolatido. Right there, second on the outside by two. Akalina runs in third. At the rail, Not a Peep is now fourth. Just her outside. Life support is fifth.

Then she's prime sixth, followed by Heavenly Pursuit seventh. Arlanda Sarlanda's the trailer as they come to the top of the stretch. And even if that name's a silly joke, in that moment, he has to take it seriously. And as they turn for home, the leader is Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti-Do. He makes these names, for once, worthy enough of the true awesome power of these horses. He's giving them their due.

And for a moment, the horse girl in me is happy. They're in the final furlong. It's Doremi Pasolati! Doremi Pasolati!

Excuse me.

Hi, how's it going? I'm sorry. I have seasonal allergies and now my voice sounds like this. Oh, no. I mean like... Next story comes to us from producer Becca Bressler. Okay. We're going to start with this guy. I'm going to drink some tea. His name is Caleb Sexton. He's an audio engineer in California. Yeah. In October 2010, early October, Caleb is scrolling on his phone and he comes across a tweet. From my friend Bailey. Okay.

who said, hey, there's this new social network that had just come out that day or the day before. Just released in the App Store. And apps are new back in 2010. Right. And there's a lot of jokes about like, can you believe it? Some kids make money on designing apps. I actually don't remember that at all. It's like not even a joke. It's just, okay. So he hears about this app called Instagram. Oh. Mm.

I have heard of that one. Have you? Have you heard of it? Okay, so it was like new then? Yeah. It was early days. So Caleb sees the tweet, downloads the app, and goes to make an account. Username at Caleb. I just typed in my name, my first name, Caleb, hit return, and it said, great, you're now Caleb. And so I thought, well, this is great. If this takes off, I'll have a short username. This will be cool. Kind of like a badge of tech honor. But beyond that, just...

grabbing something with his name on it felt kind of special. My name is not... Caleb is not a super common name. I mean, it's commoner now, but...

In the 80s, when I was growing up and a kid, my name wasn't on the souvenir license plates and keychains and stuff. My brother's name is Joshua. And so he would find stuff all the time. And I never would. Oh, I definitely feel you, Caleb. Yeah. Mine always said like California on it or whatever. And so to have something with just, I think to have something with just my name on it was cool. And I know when I would get

A few of my friends had first name handles on Instagram. My friend Bailey, she had a first name handle. Another friend of mine, Jesse, had a first name handle. And we would joke about it with each other, being the first names club and things like that. Yes. My Instagram handle is at A-N-U-J. That's at Unnage.

This is another member of this club, Anuj Verma. Anuj is another tech guy. He's actually a friend of my sister's. She is my gossip partner. She's the first person I go to with any information I get. Anyway, for Anuj, 2010, this app was a really fun play space. He was a kid who liked photography. I looked at my first photo and it has like three likes on it. What's the photo? It's a picture of a Krispy Kreme donut box.

That's a great first post. Yeah, I think early on I was posting everything. I was posting this chicken nugget shaped like a dinosaur. And Caleb too. I tried to take pictures of interesting compositions. I took a picture of a dead rat in the road that had a cigarette in its mouth. I wasn't a big filter user. Is it just because there are cigarettes on the ground and there are rats on the ground and they were next to each other? Yes. Okay. Okay.

So I took pictures of interesting textures. Did you get the sense someone put the cigarette in the mouth of... I do not. Got it. Anyway...

Instagram. From these humble beginnings. A company with only 13 employees bought today by Facebook for $1 billion. As Instagram began to grow. 700 million active monthly users. And more and more people around the world were signing up. 2 billion active monthly users. These first name handles. Can I look up the first Lulu? Ugh, it's asking me to log in. That can't be my password. Just at Lulu. Became super desirable. At Maria. At Alex.

And here on staff. Here is Simon. Who is this person? Some of us wanted to see who got our names. A lot of selfies. They were in the high school marching band. Cute little photo of her at some cafe. Hey, content creator. Mostly it was just curiosity. So weird. Giving a cool little hand sign. Just a person out there. She seems amazing. Some of us...

We're maybe a little jealous. Damn. Alex. It's a freaking journalist. And some of us were left. Man, now I want this thing that I didn't even care about a minute ago. Actually just wanting the thing. And it's like a thing I can't have. Thanks a lot, Becca. Whatever. I don't care. I don't care. I don't care. I don't even care. I don't even care. Do I care?

I don't care. But for the actual members of the first name club, at Caleb and at Unage included, it wasn't just some cool thing that you could tell people at a party. Having this first name handle started to make their lives a little complicated. I was like the flagship Caleb on Instagram. Every Caleb's misaddressed mail was coming to me.

tweens would tag their school friends. There was a YouTube celebrity named Caleb who died unexpectedly. Then I was tagged in all these memorial posts. I think what started to get interesting was when people just started commenting on my photos. People he didn't know. People with my name. Other unages slowly started swarming his profile. He doesn't know these guys. He's never met them. Are they supportive? Um...

Not exactly. One of the comments is, sell me your username. Hey, bud, my name is Jack. I'm willing to pay $1,200 for your IG handle. All forms of payment available, including Bitcoin. Give me the user. Soren, can I have your username? I'm begging. I pay 100 euros. Please. Please.

He got a DM from another Unage. Just give me a number. I will write you a check. He won't sell his username for anything short of 10 million. I gave him a firm offer of 5 million and he counted with 10 million. So anyone asking, just know the number has been set. I think I started to realize, okay, this might be something people want. What the f*** is this? Someone had made an account with the handle I hate Unage. Their profile picture? I think feet in a toilet.

At some point, this went from annoying to aggressive. Certain Caleb's would gather their friends and try to mass report me and get my account banned. Unnage ends up making his profile private. But now they're just different issues happening. Now it's just like a faceless army of unnages banging at his door. In one day, I think I got 300 emails asking for my password to be reset in one day. Wow, that's a lot. I know.

Clearly other unages are trying to get in there, trying to get in there, seeing if they could break in. And Caleb, too. That happened. Yeah. Yeah.

And one night, back in 2017... I opened up my computer to check my email, and there were, you know, 30 password reset emails. But his most recent email said that his password had actually been reset. Uh-oh. I started freaking out a little bit. Then I tried to log into my Instagram, and I couldn't log in. But then he realized the last text message he got... Said, welcome to Verizon with your new phone. And I thought, this is weird.

So I called the phone company and I asked, hey, what's going on? It took me a long time to get through. And they said, well, we just it looks like you just got a new phone. Fairly quickly, I figured out somebody had called Verizon and had my number reassigned to their own cell phone and then sent the password reset text message to themselves. And that's how they got into my Instagram.

What? And so within about 20 minutes or half an hour, it was over. All my stuff had been deleted and I had no Instagram. And actually the next day, that person put the account up for sale. It's like $5,000. I felt awful. I had built up a community of people, of friends, actual friends on Instagram. And the forum that we had those relationships in, I had been kicked out of. Um...

And so those relationships were just gone. It sucked. Eventually, a college basketball player named Caleb picked it up. Caleb Love plays for North Carolina. Who still uses it today. What is your Instagram now, Handel? It's Caleb underscore two. Caleb two underscores Sexton, I think. I know. It doesn't have quite the same ring. No. But...

As for Unage, he still has his account, even though he says that he doesn't really utilize the app that much anymore. He just feels, yeah, it's kind of discouraged him from wanting to engage. But then why would he keep it? Why not just take the money and give it to someone else? Well, I think for Unage...

It's almost like having this special thing matters to him more than being able to easily use the app. You know, I think growing up as having like an Indian name, you know, now it may be more common. I think my relationship with my name was most people see those four letters and have no idea what that sound makes.

And you have your teacher who looks at the name, pauses, and you instantly throw your hand up because you know it's you that's next on the roll call. And so that's kind of my childhood with my name is you really are trying to just educate people on it. And so now when I see maybe 200 password resets, it's like, holy crap, you know, there are a lot of

people with my name in the world. Yeah, it makes me wonder, having this kind of cool factor around your social media handle, like, does it feel like it now has capital that it didn't feel like it had when you were a kid?

I think so. I think there is some sort of validation to it or like it gives me a little bit more confidence in the name or I'm not, you know, every time I go to Starbucks and I'm sure you may have heard this, like you come up with a fake name or something because it's just not worth describing to people. That, what is your name at Starbucks? It used to be Andy. Andy. Which I don't know. I just one day, you know, four letters, a name, stuck with it.

Yeah. But now I stay on my name because I look at it. My wife actually gave me this advice. I look at it as like a moment to tell people what my name is. The one and only. My name is. My name is. At A-N-U-J. At Un-Edge. That's at Un-Edge.

Yeah, why? Like, why do people want this so bad? Like, why does everyone want the one name, the at your name? Like, why is that so desirable? I feel like this is just a primal human thing we do. Like in science, you know, taxonomists, the first time they name a species...

It's this sacred thing. It's called a holotype. It is like a sacred specimen. The first one to define the brown falcon species is held somewhere. And it gets, you know, the very first specimen to name a line. Like, it's a sacred moment. I feel like these are internet holotypes in a way, you know? It's like writing your name in fresh snow or something. Yeah, whether in pee or not. Yeah.

How else do you write it in snow? Okay. You led me there. I mean, yeah. Oh, okay. Okay. Well, to, to end, to end our show, we actually, we have a story that's kind of about this. It's about, um, the possibility of a brand new name being born and,

So my start with this word was nine and a half years ago.

When I first started at Radiolab. All right, everybody, let's collectively rewind our minds back in time tens of millions of years into the past. 66 million years ago, to be precise. One of the first things I reported and produced was the apocalyptic show. That show is about the...

that came down and like essentially annihilated the planet and killed all the dinosaurs. And a question got lobbed into the room between me, Jad, and Robert, which was just like, what do you call the last dinosaur? That like, rawr!

The very last one to take a breath? Yeah, but not like who was that? Did they have a name like Brian the Stegosaurus? But like what is the word to describe the last animal of a species? Like a term for the last individual standing before a species goes extinct? Yes, that's it. So I just went to look up that exact question. And what I bumped into...

was just a hole. There's no word. That's kind of wild that there's no word for that. I know. But inside the hole, I found a letter. And so this was in the correspondence section of Nature, April 4th, 1996. The title that Nature gave it is The Last Word. And it says...

Sir, we need a word to designate the last person, animal, or other species in his, her, its lineage. We do not have one word to describe the last person surviving or deceased in a family line or the last survivor of a species. It goes on for a while, but you get the gist. And it was written by two people, Robert M. Webster, not related to me, and Bruce Erickson. And

I wanted to find out really what made them write the letter, like why they wanted this word. And it turns out Robert Webster has died, but I did get Bruce on the phone. Hello? Oh, good. You can hear me. I can. Okay. And it turns out he and Dr. Webster worked in a nursing home where one of the patients had no kids and no surviving family members. He was the last person in his family that when he passes away...

You know, there's no one else. There's no brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, parents, children. He was the endpoint. And he wondered, you know, what do you call me? Yeah. And so while we were wondering, like, what do you call the last animal of a species? In this letter, they're wondering, what do you call like the last human of a tribe? And they kind of grouped these two ideas together and they actually proposed a name.

I'll keep reading. Okay. Okay.

Endling was suggested when we were playing with possible new words. So, but I threw out the word endling. You are the inception of endling. I didn't realize that. Yeah. A month later, Dr. Webster sticks his head in my office and says, I'm trying to get the word you came up with in the dictionary. It turns out if you want to get a word in the dictionary, you got to get the word published first. So that's why Bruce and Webster wrote this letter.

Etymologists will recognize the two components for the derivation of endling. End has several meanings, including extinction and finish, concluding part.

Ling is a suffix added to denote connected with the primary noun, but also includes line and lineage. All of which puts endling in a category of words like earthling, sibling, foundling. I learned there's a word called cloudling, which is a tiny cloud. I mean, that is a really lovely word, endling. Yeah, I liked it a lot. But...

It caused so much reaction. Like people started writing in letters being like, no, we've got a better word. Like what? Some of the responses are, I suggest Terminarch to designate the last of lineage. Terminarch. Yeah. It's a very powerful, positive spin on utter death. Yeah. Another word was Yatim, Arabic for orphan or unique of its kind. Another one was relict.

R-E-L-I-C-T. Relict. There was also Omega and Ender. Okay. But Endling is the one out of the pack that took off. It becomes a name of a symphony in Australia. This is Endling Excerpt 1 by Andrew Schultz. And then there was like a death metal album called Endling. Oh, no. Doom Metal.

They're Dutch. There was an art exhibit at the National Museum of Australia. There was a contemporary ballet. There have been a number of, like, essays written about it. There's an Endlings television show that is now streaming on Hulu in the USA. And there's also supposed to be a video game coming in spring 2022. ♪

So now that Endling's been published, it's out in the world, it's being used in the art community, I, Molly Webster, decided to call Miriam Webster to check on Robert Webster's quest to get this name in the dictionary. You're saying Webster called? Webster called. Right. And they answered.

Well, more specifically, Peter Sokolowski answered, and he is a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster. It mostly involves researching and writing definitions. Can I just say that is so cool? And I asked, now that the word endling has been published, what is the deal with getting it in the dictionary? This was a word that was noticed by, appropriately enough, our biological sciences editors. They noticed it and drafted a definition a number of years ago. The definition reads...

the last known individual of a species or lineage. But what's interesting about this is there's a kind of a big asterisk. This entry was drafted three or four years ago and is still not published. Wait, so they have the draft. They're like, we're ready to go. We're aware you're out there, word, but we're not publishing you yet. Yes. Because when this word is used, even today, it nearly always is somehow explained.

So the dictionary waits for a word to become so popular that it doesn't need a definition to then create a definition for it? Yeah, they are actually waiting for us in order to put it in the dictionary. You know, it'd be kind of neat if, what if this story helps get it to...

definition level makes the word really popular enough to become a word. Yeah, I was on board with that until I called Mary Shebest. I'm a poet. And do you have any like... Mary has this insanely surrealistic poetry book called Incarnadine. And I first called her when we were working on Gonads, our series on sex and reproduction. If you remember any of that or remember it differently. The truth is, Molly, I have no memory of it at all. That's wonderful. That's great. Let's

What came up in this conversation was that Mary had also heard this word, endling. And as a poet who thinks about words a lot, she kept thinking about it. I mean, Molly, I think about, I mean, I was born in 1970. And I mean, basically in my lifetime, very roughly, the human population has doubled dramatically.

And the wildlife population has been cut in half. In that way, it feels important to have a word for this type of thing. But on the other hand, Mary was hesitant when it came to using a word for a singular human being. I have a fear that it sort of puts the emphasis on

on the loneliness of that last creature. Like it feels lonely to you, Endling. Yeah, you know, poor little Endling. Mary was saying that she thought a lot about these aunts that she grew up with who didn't have kids and...

And there was a sense of despair around them. One of them, she became a kind of a ghost in my grandmother's house. Another aunt who just sort of came apart after her husband died. And, you know, I remember...

saying, I might as well burn and throw out all my things, all my photos. Nobody's ever going to want them. There's nobody to pass anything on to. And she actually did. And I think the care that they had put into the world toward other people just hadn't mattered that much. There was this unspoken sense. They were sort of dead ends.

Like, honestly, as a person who probably won't have kids, there is a tenderness that I could be the last of a Webster. Just millions of years of, you know, genetic history and ancestry just ends here. But...

I also don't think that's like the sum total of what I am. And so I don't even want a word that like points at that and doubles down on it. I want society to say like, you are more than your genes. Here are all the ways that you rippled out into the world. Goober.

Goober. That I gave Goober to somebody. Like, maybe I am the last of a Webster, but I have given my Websterness to as many people as I could.

And through them, they'll remember that we say Flickr instead of remote control. And they'll make chips and cheese, which is just cheddar cheese on white tortilla chips. Melted? Melted in the microwave on a paper plate. Chips and cheese. Oh, man. I want chips and cheese tonight. I want chips and cheese right now. Oh.

So good. You know, one of the things that I started thinking about was the image of the coral reef. You know, it's a totally flawed and imperfect metaphor, but... Each individual coral animal, because it is an animal even though it looks like a plant, is just like the size of a nickel. It's really small, but still... Nourishing, feeding this larger system...

It's this living, breathing community that has visually from afar like these little nubbin endpoints. But nobody exists as a dead end.

Even if you're like at the furthest, furthest, furthest little tip of coral way out there, there's like little things living inside of you and you're giving back and you're like helping out your little community. And then even if you die, more coral comes along and they build more coral on top of your little dead calcium carbonate limestone body. And you're part of a larger structure on which other life can grow.

So when it comes to using this word "endling," I'm guessing a lot here, but I go back to that person in the nursing home who asked, like, "What am I?" And it's like, you are you. You are someone that asked a question that stuck with a doctor, that led to a journal article, that led to a dictionary fight, that brought about some doom metal, that led to all of us sitting here thinking about this.

And I just don't think that that means that they're an endling or that any of us are. Senior correspondent, Molly Webster.

This episode was conceived of and wrangled entirely by editor extraordinaire Alex Neeson. This episode was reported by Latif Nasser, Carolyn McCusker, Annie McEwen, Becca Bressler, Molly Webster, and me with help from Tad Davis. It was produced by Pat Walters, Matt Kielty, Sindhu Nyanasambandan, Annie McEwen, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, with help from Eli Cohen.

Jeremy Bloom contributed music and sound design with mixing help from Arianne Wack. A very special thank you to Jim Wright, Cole Del Charco, Peter Frick-Wright, Ben Zimmer, Elaine Andrews, and Bruce Erickson. And a huge special thanks to my sister, Alexa Rose Miller. If you want to learn more about her work on how embracing uncertainty saves lives, check out artspractica.com. I'm Latif. I'm Lulu. Thanks for listening.

Yeah. Lacha, if you know what I'd like to unname? What's that? Our medium of podcast. Oh, yeah. No, you did a whole tweet thread. What was the best one you came up with? Just the best one. Okay. Okay. I kind of liked Balado, which was a descendant of Balador, French for Walkman. That's not going to work. That's not going to fly. Taki came up. Taki? I don't mind Taki. Oddcast. Oddcast. Oddcast.

Oh, there was Rodcast, Radio On Demand, Rod. That would really empower a lot of people named Rod. Phone Blast, Phone Show, Pocket Program, Battery Sucker. Pocket Program? That is really, it's so bad it might be good. ARS, Asynchronous Radio Show. No, none of these are really. Worldcast, Publicast, Freecast, Opencast, Purecast, Vastcast, Ear Therapy. Ear Therapy. NBA, Non-Broadcast Audio, Eeries. Should I stop? Eeries? Eeries?

Yeah. Wow. As much as I hate the word podcast now, I hate it slightly less. I feel like oral, oral gram. Hey, you are all right. OK, I have to go to a meeting. Bye. OK.

Oh, one more thing before we go. To all of our lab members, there is a special extra shiny, glassy piece of audio coming your way in the members feed. Mary Shebist from The Endling Story reads a poem that she wrote, a really beautiful one. If you're a member, thank you. You can go check it out now. And if you're not a member, but you would like to listen to it too, you can sign up.

at radiolab.org slash join. You have no idea how much your support means to us. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Lateef Nasser are our co-hosts. Susie Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes...

Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez,

With help from Carolyn McCusker and Sarah Sandbeck.

Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Adam Schiebel. Hi, this is Finn calling from Storrs, Connecticut. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.