From Essays After Montaigne
...they are dashes and trickes of the pen, common unto a thousand men. many are there in all races or families both of one name and surname! And how many in divers families, races, ages, and countries? Historie hath knowne three Socrates, five Platoes, eight Aristotles, seven Xenophons, twenty Demetrius, twenty Theodores: besides which, imagine how many came not to her knowledge. Who letteth my horse boy to call himselfe Pompey the great? But after all, what meanes, what devices are there that annex unto my horse-keeper deceased, or to that other who had his head cut off in Ægypt, or that joyne unto them this glorified and farrenowned word and these pen-dashes so much honoured, that they may thereby advantage themselves?
In Plato's Cratylus, Socrates asks that by naming, "do we not give information to one another, and distinguish things according to their natures?" He then spends much of the rest of the dialogue giving a seemingly endless list of word derivations to prove his point. Here, for instance, is his etymology of "hero" (which turns out to be at least as plausible as any modern etymology):
All of them sprang either from the love of a God for a mortal woman, or of a mortal man for a Goddess; think of the word in the old Attic, and you will see better that the name heros is only a slight alteration of Eros, from whom the heroes sprang: either this is the meaning, or, if not this, then they must have been skilful as rhetoricians and dialecticians, and able to put the question (erotan), for eirein is equivalent to legein. And therefore, as I was saying, in the Attic dialect the heroes turn out to be rhetoricians and questioners. All this is easy enough; the noble breed of heroes are a tribe of sophists and rhetors.
But the naming of things is a far less common event than the naming of people, and it uses a different logic. Things are named descriptively (the Internet connects two or more networks), while people are named prescriptively (at least here and now), reflecting their parents' memories, customs, and hopes. You can usually tell more about the parents than the child by how that child has been named, though the name may also shape the child over time.
My own name means some variation on "one who lives by the sea" in several languages native to the United Kingdom. This seems fitting, since I'm mostly descended from the United Kingdom (England and Scotland) and long to be by the sea. The Kabalarians (a name that reminds me of the Movementarians on The Simpsons) believe that "your name creates your thinking." Another Morgan pointed me to their analysis of our name. Some of it rings true in the way that a newspaper horoscope might, but much of it is simply wrong.
But when they named me, my parents took none of these historical or metaphysical meanings into account. I recently discovered that one of my father's grandmothers' maiden names was Morgan, but that's not why they named me Morgan either. No, I was named after the movie Morgan! (also released as Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment). My mother has always been quick to point out that they chose that name for me not because they particularly liked the title character, but because they liked the way the name sounded in an English accent. When the movie was released on DVD, my wife got me a copy so that I could finally see it. I immediately saw the reason for my mother's peremptory qualification. After watching this story of an odd, cerebral man who couldn't quite figure out how to fit into the world or connect to others, who couldn't see the world on any terms but his own, and so ends up in an institution, I was depressed and angry. My parents may not have had that character in mind when they named me, but it has become descriptive (in a way that would please the Kabalarians) as I've grown into the character.
8:03:40 AM 
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