Water, gold, stones, personages of ancient Greece, cats upon mats. Things used to illustrate the frailty of language. Most creatures inherit their names from a strange encounter between poetry and science. Substance and property used to waltz with one another; now they exchange digits. Stars with names composed of parallax and spectroscopy, the consecutive assignment of the compiler, embedded in the night. Adam gave names to the animals but Eve could not remember what they did. A variable like a train ticket or an old sweater to catch and remember, or to take a fall. Dissatisfaction with the materiality of language leads to the melancholy of two-dimensional semantic analysis. We inherit variable names of the previous generations, change their significance and pass them along. To change one’s style, one’s signature, one’s skin or one’s signifier. The permutations of a shapeshifter, the hardware of the myth. How did Pygmalion get into the ticking of the pocket watch? There must be some connection between the name and the world.