A title can change a picture without touching any of its colors.

A title enters the eye before the image does and quietly instructs it. The same arrangement of colours becomes a mourning, a landscape, or a joke depending on the words attached, and once the frame is set it is very hard to see the picture without it. Naming is not a label on top of a thing but part of the thing.

Notice this in ordinary life, where naming does the same work. Calling a period a setback or an interval, calling a trait stubbornness or persistence, changes what you can do with it. Nothing about the facts moves, and yet almost everything about your relationship to them does.