Why So Much Concern Over Names

I always found it interesting how much of a taboo there is in the Jewish religion over God’s name. My understanding:

• There is no agreed upon name of God in Hebrew. Despite what some Christians and textual critics propose, people hold the true pronunciation is lost and that to truly pronounce God’s name would have some sort of mystical consequence.
• In services when we pronounce the Hebrew we say the Greek “lord” and it is considered blasphemous to use this name casually even though it is literally as far as I can tell just an indirect Greek appellation that was taken into Hebrew.
• I always found the Lewis Carroll passage where the knight distinguishes between a song’s name and what it is called amusing, and I used to joke about not only giving something a name but giving its name a name — but we seem to do exactly that when we refer to God as “Hashem” — using a name for God’s name indirectly as God’s name.
• Orthodox Jews will not even write the word God but hyphenate the “o”, something that to my mind was always odd. Why would even an English word have special significance? And why would that significance be blunted specifically by erasing the vowel? Wouldn’t it be somehow more consistent to only allude to the word by writing it as say “G—“ or even just saying “the name” in English as well?

This strangeness came to the front for me even more after reading Saul Kripke (an Orthodox Jew to boot) who proposed that philosophically names have no meaning, only a reference. So from that perspective, what name one uses to refer to God would seem to be completely insignificant, since aside from referring such a name would have no content. I actually wonder on that sort of view whether God could have a name, since things are supposed to receive names through a causal chain connecting the name to the thing named (I point at something and say — this is water” — and the fact that water is part of the story is what makes the word have its meaning.)

So I don’t know if there’s exactly a point here, but this was always something I felt I didn’t quite understand — and the idea that we actually use the name of a name as a name is an interesting application of what I had thought was otherwise only an odd conceptual possibility (that names can themselves have names).