— Romeo and Juliet (1597), Act 2, Scene 2
About this quote
हिन्दी में
नाम में क्या रखा है? जिसे हम गुलाब कहते हैं, उसे किसी और नाम से पुकारें तो भी उसकी महक वैसी ही मीठी रहेगी।
What it means
The argument rests on one carefully chosen test case. Scent is settled in the flower and checked by the nose, so language genuinely cannot reach it, and the rose makes the claim look self-evident. But a family name is not that kind of property. Its effects are manufactured by other people’s belief in it, so renaming really does change what it does, and the analogy holds only for qualities that live inside the object.
Read as a general truth about names, which is how it is usually quoted, it is simply false, and the speaker half knows it. This is a girl reasoning her way toward a decision she has already taken, and the eloquence is aimed at herself as much as at the night air.
What it teaches you
The transferable skill here is analogy-checking: before accepting a comparison, ask whether the property being compared is the same kind of property in both cases. A useful test is to locate where the value sits. If it sits in the thing, renaming is cosmetic; if it sits in other people’s agreement, then the name is part of the mechanism and changing it changes the outcome. Prices, reputations, job titles, castes and currencies all belong to the second kind, and arguments that treat them like the smell of a flower are about to go wrong.
अर्थ और सीख
जूलियट का तर्क एक चुने हुए उदाहरण पर टिका है: गुलाब की महक फूल के भीतर बसी है और नाक से जाँची जा सकती है, भाषा उसे छू नहीं सकती। पर ख़ानदानी नाम महक जैसा नहीं होता — उसका असर दूसरों के मानने से बनता है, इसलिए नाम बदलने पर असर भी बदलता है। काम की बात यह है कि किसी उपमा को मानने से पहले देखें कि जिस गुण की तुलना हो रही है, वह चीज़ के भीतर है या लोगों की सहमति में।
Where it comes from
Juliet, alone on the balcony, not knowing Romeo is listening. The argument she is making is that names are arbitrary labels which cannot change the thing named — a position the play then disproves in the most literal way available.
Both of them die because of their surnames. Shakespeare gives the heroine the philosophical case and the plot the last word.
