Voltaire Reminds Us to Find a Badass Word Now and Then. Like “Voltaire.”

You have to admit, Voltaire is a badass name. Ask yourself: why was there never a kid in your class named Voltaire?* Not named after the French writer/philosopher. Just purely for the sound of it. Six letters of crackle and nerve. It does not matter if your branding exercise is commercial or personal, if you need exactly one word to not be boring, get yourself a name like Voltaire.

That’s what he did. He made it up.

He ditched François-Marie Arouet after a stint in the Bastille and engineered something better. "Voltaire" is possibly an anagram of his Latinized surname. Possibly a nod to his childhood nickname, le petit volontaire, "determined little thing." Possibly a syllable-flip of his family's hometown. Biographer Richard Holmes argues a writer like Voltaire would've wanted the name to carry speed and daring, as in voltige (trapeze acrobatics), or volte-face (spinning to face your enemy), volatile (originally, any winged creature, later, a nutty temperament). Meanwhile, "Arouet" rhymed uncomfortably with à rouer: "to be beaten up."

So he just reinvented himself. In fact, he used 178 other pen names throughout his life. The man understood that words were propellents, not furniture.

Why does this matter in 2026? Because Voltaire wouldn’t wipe his Volte with most of today’s words.

More words are "written" in one day than existed in all of human civilization up to the moment he coined his own name. 402 million terabytes of data generated daily. 333 billion emails. You can spew language out of chatbots en masse now. Paragraphs for pennies. Volume was never the point. Voltaire wasn't prolific because he was fast. He was prolific because every single word was doing something.

Back in Voltaire's day, maybe 10% of people could even read. Books were scarce objects. While churning out heady writing, he was also intuitively working in a more visceral language, still connected to sound, nerve, instinct that reached the other 90%.

Most words today signal get-along go-along. They fill space, confirm things people already believe, avoid trouble. Granted, the world wouldn't benefit from everyone changing their name from Frank to Galacticon and starting a content channel (although this is already happening). What we're talking about is something harder: being the islands in the deluge. Choosing words that are load-bearing.

Voltaire was speaking a more visceral language. The one that doesn't care how it looks because he didn't want to be "guy who gets beaten up." He was feeling it. Punk rock with a quill pen. Prince, only the symbol was his whole name.

The answer to too many words isn't more words. It's selection. Kill the filler, the hedges, the throat-clearing. Make things up when the existing words aren't pulling their weight. Say the one true thing instead of the seven approximate ones. Sound unfamiliar.

It’s simply a call to be Voltaire walking out of prison, looking at his boring name, and saying: Nope. I have a much badasser word in mind.

• If there was a kid in your class named Voltaire, disregard this question.