A brief warning before we begin.
Do not misname the things you love.

Not your sons. Not your daughters.
Not the dog curled at your feet, nor the car that’s carried you farther than your own convictions.

A name is not a tag. Nor a label. Not just a sound you repeat until something answers. It is a force. A calling. A mirror turned toward being.

Because to name something wrongly is not merely to confuse it — it is to miscreate. To summon something false in place of what might have been true.

Let me explain.

To name things truthfully is a primal virtue — almost Adamic in its weight.

Let us remember: Adam was not merely the first man.
He was the first to speak into creation, not merely of it.
“The man gave names to all livestock, and to the birds of the heavens, and to every beast of the field” (Genesis 2:20, ESV).

In that moment, Adam became more than witness.
He became the first philologist,
the first taxonomist,
and — in a sense both practical and metaphysical —
the first archivist of reality.

The creatures were, until then, merely there. After him, they were called. Summoned. Individuated. Named.

Which means Adam was also, quietly, the first baptizer. I confess, I cannot think of a greater honor: To speak a word and, in doing so, summon a thing into meaning. God, with a word, called the world into being. “Let there be…” — and there was. Adam, with another kind of word, called that same world into intimacy. Into identity. He did not create — he designated. He discerned. And perhaps, he revealed.

I won’t weigh this down with a lecture on ousia (οὐσία) and hypostasis (ὑπόστασις) — substance and subsistence — though the temptation is real. Let me simply say this: something becomes what it is only when it is rightly named. Until then, it lingers in a kind of limbo — not quite void, but not quite presence either. Like a dream you can’t retell. Like a face you’ve almost forgotten.

And if God is the Word (John 1:1), and creation is uttered, not assembled, then the Name becomes not just a label, but a metaphysical event. An identity revealed. A being called forth.

In this sense — and in this sense only — Adam called the world into being for a second time.

Tell me: is that not magnificent?

Still, a question haunts me:
Was Adam’s act symbolic? Or — strengthened by divine presence and armed, perhaps, with a pre-critical Kantian intuition — did he touch the Ding an sich itself, the thing-in-itself, and name it from within? Did he speak not just a name, but the name — the one that resonates with essence, not appearance?

It’s a fair question. Especially considering all the things that came after:
Synthetic rubber.
YouTube.
Bosons.
Polonium.
Entropic systems.
Quasars.
Polyethylene.

And yet this post isn’t about them.

It’s about something else:
The strange and luminous collaboration between God and Man.

Because when God lends His speech to humanity, He does not merely offer vocabulary.
He offers co-creation. Co-responsibility.
He lets the human mouth echo the divine Fiat.

We are allowed — terrifyingly — to name.

And that brings me here, to what I’ve really come to say.

Because if naming is a sacred act, then misnaming is a form of betrayal.
If to name rightly is to give being, then to name wrongly is to deform being.
A thing misnamed is a thing miscalled, misclassified, misshaped — a thing left in exile.

And I believe many things remain unnamed still.
Or worse — they were named too quickly. Too carelessly. Too selfishly.
And so they never quite made it into the world we share with God.
They exist — yes. But they remain unbaptized.

The unbaptized world is vast. And loud.
It is the world of humans without reverence. Of language without light.

That is why I believe humanity still bears a flicker of that Adamic vocation:
The power to name — and through naming, to reveal.

When we name rightly — people, things, places — we take our place beside the Creator.
We invite what is unnamed to step into the light.
To be.

I would like to be their advocate — these misnamed, unnamed, disfigured things.
I would like to give them their true names.
I would like to call them, once more, into being.

Philosophy — God help me — has made me a believer.
Because it has taught me this: a name is not an accessory. It is a vocation.
To misname is to mislead.
To rename is sometimes the only path back to essence.
To call something, or someone, by its true name — is to set it free.

Which brings me — finally — to what I meant to ask all along:

“The Suicide Service.” Do you really think that’s the right name?

Because if naming can call something into being, it can just as easily call it away.

There is a more insidious power hidden in language — the power not to create, but to unmake. To assign a name so false, so hollow, so sterile, that the thing itself disappears behind it. Not in the literal sense — the body may remain — but ontologically, existentially, spiritually: it ceases to matter. It becomes background noise.

We are trained, from birth, to fear what is unnamed.
But far more dangerous are the things that have been named wrong.
And we live among them.

Take a word like “collateral damage.”
What is it, really, but a ceremony of erasure?
A syntactic sleight of hand, in which civilian lives — women, children, whole apartment blocks — are linguistically evaporated. Not murdered. Not bombed. Not dismembered. Just… damaged. Collateral to something more important. As if human beings were packaging.

Or “enhanced interrogation.”
What a polite little veil. As if pain, when carefully administered and bureaucratically logged, loses its moral weight. As if it matters how you scream, or how long. Torture, but with a lanyard and a clearance badge.

Or — yes — “Suicide Service.”
A phrase so grotesquely efficient it almost slips past the ear. But stop and look: what is it saying? That death is a service. That despair is institutionalized. That there is an office — a room with a desk and a drawer full of names — where someone decides who should cease to be.

It doesn’t even hide.

And yet, it works — precisely because it names. It puts a label on the unthinkable. It gives it a logo. A workflow. A silence.

Naming, in the wrong hands, is not just distortion.
It is annihilation by absorption.

It allows horror to pass for order.
It allows injustice to wear a tie.
It allows violence to punch out at 5PM, then drive home to its family.

Naming-as-erasure is the logic of the age.
And the more euphemistic the name, the more violent the silence it generates.

Which is why I believe — still, despite it all — in naming rightly.
Even now.
Especially now.

To name something truly is to make it impossible to look away.
To call the thing what it is — and thus refuse the comfort of euphemism.

Because as long as they get to name, we do not get to see.
And if we do not see — we will not act.

So let me say it one more time, without hesitation and without veil:

The Suicide Service is not a name.
It is a crime, dressed as a noun.