Deep Thought: What's in a Name?
Created | Updated Feb 14, 2021
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Deep Thought: What's in a Name?
Yeah, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. But if you don't know what to call it, nobody else will know what you are talking about.
This reminds me suddenly of the time back at university in Bonn that I spent several minutes trying to describe this thing I needed to borrow for a presentation. It was a machine, see, where you put a page of text under a light and it threw the image onto a wall screen… ? If only I knew the German word for it…
'Ach,' said the teaching assistant, another student. 'Du meinst Overhead Projektor.' (Of course, she pronounced it 'Pro-YECK-tor'.) That was me told.
The other day, some very bright and sympathetic people on Twitter were bemoaning a bad habit that apparently exists in the UK. 'Why,' they asked, 'Can you pronounce 'mitochondria' and 'antidisestablishmentarianism', but can't learn to pronounce African names right?'
Why, indeed? It's a matter of effort, and it shows something unpleasant about people if they refuse to try. Seriously? African names are mostly easy. I remember spending a gleeful half hour learning to pronounce David Oyelowo's name. It's a cool name, and he's a good actor, but I have what linguistics people call 'the Appalachian speech defect.'
More than fifty years ago, I and my fellow pupils at the junior high school hugely enjoyed the first day of school. That was the day when our teachers had to struggle their way through the roll call lists. We had no African, Asian, or Hispanic names, alas. What we had were southern and eastern European names. Some of the Russian and Polish names were scant in the vowel department. Of course, we kids knew how to pronounce our friends' last names. We found them fascinating and felt outclassed if our names were something dumb like Smith or Kurtz, although the preacher's son pronounced his last name (Koehler) as 'Kayler', and always made a joke about the local Koehler beer, which was pronounced 'Kohler'. This was not nearly as much fun as listening to an adult attempt 'Remerowski' at the first try. They learned quickly, though: it's part of life in western Pennsylvania.
When I got my bachelor's degree, our commencement speaker was Zbigniew Brzezinski. Our parents didn't bat an eye. They just complained that they didn't know what he was talking about, because nobody speaks Economics. The 'other university' lucked up and got Fred Rogers, why couldn't we? Not because of his name: Mr Rogers sang to them, rather than talking Policy.
About thirty years ago, I looked forward to new students in my ESL (English as Second Language) classes for the variety of new names I would learn. Laotians have cool names. One of my students, a lovely man with the first name of Southy (Soo-THEE), had a problem one day. His telephone bill was way too high, and he needed help to navigate the bureaucracy. Off we went to my supervisor's office for a free landline.
'I don't have a 'Soo-THEE',' said the confused operator. 'I do have a SOUTH-ee.'
'That's it,' I confirmed. We found out somebody had been making 900 calls from Southy's home phone while he was at work evenings. Oh, no, he insisted. It couldn't be his five kids…
I later had some of those kids, and his nieces and nephews, in the public-school ESL class. An adorable but mischievous lot. They were perfectly capable of prank-calling the Psychic Hotline when mom and dad weren't around. We got the phone company to block the calls, another small victory in the struggle for communication.
I learned to teach my adult immigrant students what I had learned from eleven years' resident alien experience: always carry a pad and pencil to write down hard words. Like 'clutch' when you're at the garage. And remember to spell your name slowly.
When I was a kid, some other kids made bad puns on my name. Others gave me nicknames I didn't like. I avoided kids like that. The only one I forgave was my buddy Mickey, who meant no harm. He teased everyone, it was his way. Besides, he had a difficult-to-spell Polish last name, and he took it in stride if people got it wrong. At least his had vowels in…
What do we do when we learn each other's names? We show respect and a willingness for friendship. The same goes for picking up a phrase or two in another language, even when we don't have to, or remembering to wish someone a pleasant holiday. Paying attention to little things like this isn't 'political correctness'. It's good manners. It's worth far more than long, meaningless speeches about tolerance.
Sure as God made little green apples, somebody's going to tell me how obvious this is. I never claimed to be a deep thinker. (The column title is ironic.) But if it's so bleedin' obvious, as Henry Letterbox might say, then why was there a whole thread about it on Twitter?
