Introducing your Secret Name

 Posted on November 11, 2010 in Uncategorized

The government is going to give you a name. This name will be revealed by the government only to you, and you will have to use it in your dealings with the government.

Wrongdoers will, if they know your real name (slave name, strawman name, all-caps gold-fringe UCC admiralty wingnut name, whatever you call it) and learn your secret name, have a measure of power over you-they'll be able to make your life more difficult. Your secret name will be seven letters long.

There will be a pattern to a name : the first four letters will identify when and where the name wasissued, and the last three will be issued in sequence-AAA, AAB, AAC,and so forth. So a malefactor can generate a secret seven-letter name, but it won't match the real name to which the government has attached it.

You should definitely keep your secret name a secret. But other people can make revealing your secret name a condition of your doing business with them. In fact, many people will make it a condition. You will often have to choose between keeping your name secret and dealing conveniently with modern life.

A preposterous idea, right? There are people that believe in secret names that, if known, can harm them, but those people are "primitive" "savages" while we are civilized. And besides, even if we were to adopt secret seven-letter names that could be used "as a handle by which to injure their owners," we sure wouldn't let the government have them, much less assign them. Further, we wouldn't go sharing them with other people for mere convenience.

Forget the whole thing-these Secret Seven-letter Names will never catch on.

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Note: I chose seven letters not for the sake of the abbreviation, but because, using a 26-letter alphabet, words must have at least seven letters to have as many permutations as a 9-digit number.