Memorising names for fun and profit

Much of my more powerful thinking is based around words. This unifies casually studying languages, having so much fun with anagrams, restricting my dialect for better thinking, and making many puns. The side effect of such a mind is that I depend on words a lot, probably more than average. That notably includes needing words as a key to by which to recall memory-values.

To think of a specific person — what I remember them doing, how they think, what they look like, or in other senses — I need a simpler stimulus that points to all that conceptually. A simple stimulus, in my mind, takes the form of a word. I could make up descriptions for each person by which to think of them, like "the joyous dark-skinned religious convert" or "she who sat between Hannah and Ethan", and indeed do, but this is far from ideal. My made-up descriptions often differ from how others think of the people they target, which inhibits their use in speech. Simple descriptions can only give so much detail, and so ambiguously target many people. When specific enough to target only one person from those I know, descriptions tend to be annoyingly long to think of.

Thinking repeatedly of a description ossifies it — practice makes habit — exacerbating the flaws of that approach. I depend on words, so I think of whatever words I used to describe a person just as often as I think of the person, so I risk ossifying a flawed description. Names are well-established as simple, compact shared stimuli to evoke people, so I strive to find people's names quickly.

We must know [names]. We will know [names].

— David Hilbert, approximately

Asking for or overhearing someone's name, by default, gives me merely their given name. Those avoid only some deficiencies of improvised descriptions. Full names are much more precise. Hence I seek surnames almost as avidly.

That's the profit of memorising names. The fun is a side benefit. By habitually and skillfully pursuing names, I can surprise others with my knowledge, which often makes them at least one of pleased or scared, both of which I enjoy.