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People are weird.

At one moment we can be calm, rational, and sometimes even distant individuals and the next moment we act with passion, with humor, and even with childish glee.

An example.  I was having a Twitter conversation the other day about cars with a close friend who had also recently bought a car.  We were discussing car nicknames.  We both had given our cars nicknames, and it wasn’t just us as several others chimed into the conversation with their pet names for their cars.

Here we were, adult individuals and we were giving our cars pet names like we were kids or something.  Another example?  I went to register my new car on the car website and they actually asked if my car had a nickname.  Why?

My car won’t go any faster or save more gasoline or avoid other cars with a nickname.  So why do it?

Maybe it’s a hold over from childhood as we named everything in our small world in order to get a small measure of control over things that were otherwise out of our control.  Maybe it’s a relic from the days when Greek sailors would name their ships and paint eyes on the bows so the ships would “see where they were going”.  A little bit of home-made magic.

Maybe in a cold digital and increasingly distant world we need to feel that there is something warm, organic, and familiar around us.  Even if it is something lifeless like a car.  Giving it a name seems to imbue it with a little bit of life, seems to make it a little less cold and a little bit warmer.

Sometimes we all need that in our life.