Names and meaning.

I read yesterday, during one of my adventures into the wilds of the web, the second or third discrediting commentary on my web-wide screen name, Vain Apocalypse. It seems that some people have taken it to be trite or childishly melodramatic. The people who make these remarks are apparently of the opinion that proper screen names should be restricted to clumsy attempts at humor or allusion or be entirely irrelevant or undecipherable. I thought I might elaborate here on the relevancy and meaning in my screen name and perhaps as well as my real name.

It is an ambiguous abbreviation for my worldview. The words each have two separate denotations. As taken from the online Cambridge dictionary, to be vain is either to be exceedingly “interested in your own appearance or achievements,” that is, be marked by self absorbedness, or to be “unsuccessful or useless; of no value.” The word apocalypse in modern usage denotes an “event resulting in great destruction and change.” Its Greek etymology, however, denotes a revelation of things once veiled.

The screen name Vain Apocalypse calls together themes on egocentrism, futility, destruction and things revealed. The denotations of the word “Vain” are the most important, as they call together things that are directly opposed, prideful self reverence in the presence of nihilistic futility. It is the mergence of subjective internal values with the cold, objectively valueless external world. Readers of philosophy will recognize the duality, as it appears very often, and the struggle between them is the cornerstone in Albert Camus’ absurdism. Apocalypse is straighter forward in its relevancy. It merely expresses a destruction of orders that are old and a revelation of things that are new.

Vain Apocalypse communicates that I am an egoist, an absurdist, a despiser of the old and the stagnant and a believer that new things must always be discovered. That’s not so trite and melodramatic, is it?

Regarding my real name, I know not the accuracy of their sources, but sites that list the etymological origin of names and match them with meanings are all fairly in agreement. Perhaps they derive the meaning of the names from the nature of characters who originally possessed them, or perhaps it is vice versa.

“James,” Hebrew of course, represents the supplanter, which means the one who takes the place of something. Supplantation is central to my worldview; the decrepit, the unfit, the weak and the wrong must be replaced by the new and the strong. Progress is preferable to stagnation, always. “Earl” is of Irish origin and denotes nobility. I may be stretching it a bit, but I think that nobility is a fine representation for an elevated value in one’s self, that is, egoism. “Adams” obviously is from the Judeo-Christian creation story’s character Adam, who was made of mud, earthen stuff, so it’s fitting that the name, everywhere I look, is said to represent something “of the Earth.” “Earthly” is something that I very much am, being a naturalist and hence having little concern for things dealing in the antonym of earthly; of divine or spiritual stuff, I most certainly am not.

James Earl Adams III I take to refer to an egoist who is of the natural world, not the supernatural, and who values the ejection of the outdated.