Call it what you will, it will be what it is.

From Alfred’s journal

Switch spent the better part of the morning insisting that the hawk on the water tower was an eagle. He said it with such conviction that I looked twice, and for a moment I wanted him to be right, because an eagle would have made the morning larger. It was a red-tail. It did not care what either of us called it; it dropped off the tank, took a pigeon over the lumberyard, and the pigeon was no less dead for having been killed by a bird with the wrong name. I used to think naming a thing was most of the work of knowing it, and I spent years collecting names the way other birds collect string. Call it what you will, it will be what it is. Switch asked me later what the hawk's name was, his own name for himself, and I had no answer for that one.