what's in a name?

I grew up in a small town outside of Washington D.C. where everyone knew each other and it had been around for a long time. I lived there until I was eleven when I moved to Ohio. There was a grocery store called Safeway that I always went to when I was a child. There was also a video store located near the grocery store.

The video store was called right video and it had a black and white sign. I had gone to the store since I was young and after the big boom with blockbuster the name ended up changing. This caused the store to become more like blockbuster the old store. The people around the area began to call it Blockbuster since it was a more common name. My family, however continued to call it right video until we left. The video store had changed since it was no longer family owned. The selection and prices had changed that my family had stopped going to it. I don’t think it was the name that changed the store but more of the ownership of the store. There were a few people who still called it right video but most were older and didn’t understand who Blockbuster was. After living in Ohio for a few years we returned to visit the old area. The name had been changed back to right video, however this time everyone was still calling is Blockbuster since it was a more common name and people understood it better.

Next to the video store there was a grocery store which was called Safeway. When I was young it was one of my favorite places to go since it was exciting and I got to pick out the food I wanted. When we moved the name of the store that we went to changed since it was now called Kroger in Ohio. It wasn’t as much as a name change but a change of the name that the store we went too. As a child my mother would always call it Safeway so the name never changed for me even though it was a different place. Some of the items that were in the store still bore the name Safeway. I figured that there was no difference between the two stores. When we first moved to Ohio my family called the store Safeway until slowly we changed over to Kroger since it was the real name. Sometimes my family still slips up and calls it Safeway but as a whole it is still called Kroger.

A name is just something given to a place, item or person to tell it apart from one another. If there is a name change it doesn’t constitute that the place has changed. Many things may be connected to the name like history but it is the memories of that place which is important. In the play Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, there is a line that says, What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet” A name is just something that is given to an object is doesn’t change the object in anyway. It is the history and knowledge of the object that changes it.