Shakespeare once said "That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." Perhaps to others, this might be true, less observant folk. Not so to the rose itself. The rose is many things, not just a "rose," and it should be called that at the appropriate time in its life—when it is no longer a rosebud, or a rose floret while it's still tight-wrapped, waiting to bloom. A rose is the fully-bloomed flower, different in its full incarnation from what came before, though yes, there was a hint of what it might be while still in the bud. Then the bloom is off the rose, and the rose hip forms from what's left when the petals are gone. The transformation continues across its life span.
I don't like being called Pumpkin. Or Tempe. Those are names from my childhood, from before I became who I am now. By calling me those names, they attempt to call me back to a version of me they knew better, and had some control over my actions. People who shorten my name to Tempe now, without asking how I'd like to be called? Well, you might as well call a rose an iris. It's just not who the rose is.
Dr. Temperance Brennan. It's like calling the rose by the name people know it commonly by. "Peace," or "Golden Celebration," or "Alba." It is a specific name for a particular type of a rose, one marked by the color and floral pattern, the appearance of clusters of flowers, leaves, and branches—its outward appearance. But these common names fail to capture some of the larger nuances, including genus, and type—Is the rose floribunda? Hybrid? Tea? Rugosa? The common name gives you someplace to start, yes, but you need to look further to really find out what kind of rose it is.
Temperance, or Brennan (or even, in one case, just "Bren") are better. If someone asks, these are the names I'll tell them I wish to be called by. I'm giving permission, and information. And by honoring my choice, and calling me by a name of my choosing, those people are accepting my choices about how I want to be called, how I choose to present myself as an adult. They're not trying to hold me to a name that applied a long time ago, to a girl who ceased to exist not long after those names no longer hung in the air. As soon as the voices calling "Pumpkin?" or "Tempe, let's go!" disappeared, so did those names. Same with Joy. That's a name that I never recalled being called by—it doesn't describe who I've ever been up to now, either as a name, or a concept. I am not marked by the word, joy.
When you call something by its proper name, it should encompass all of its iterations—all it ever was, is now, and can be. All the past, all the present, all the possibilities. So, for a rose, it would be thusly: Kingdom: Plantae, Division: Magnoliophyta, Class: Magnoliopsida, Order: Rosales, Family: Rosaceae, Subfamily: Rosoideae, Genus: Rosa, and then the subspecies name. That's the full name of the rose, the one that captures the truth. Because that's the point of a name—to not just provide a linguistic nominative by which to call something in order to make identification possible in conversation, but also to describe the truth about what the thing is. The name can be long or short, it doesn't matter. The only thing that's important is that the name captures the truth.
Bones. That's the real name that describes me, even though it took me a while to discover it. Naming things is serious business, though, and sometimes you need a little help with it—another gardener who loves roses as much as you do, and wants to make sure the flower's properly named, so there's no mistake about what it is. Of course, not all gardeners are as talented as others-- neither are all the garden's visitors, and so while they may have some information, they don't know the full name of the rose-- but the rose does, and so does the gardener who names it. Bones is the name of the rose—no other name smells as sweet.