Name Calling

I have a serious issue about not pronouncing people’s names right, or at least about not even trying to pronounce people’s names right. As a result, I started not liking one of my professors on day 1.

This is what happened.

You all know the drill for the first day of the school. Right before whoever’s in charge calls roll, they make some self-deprecating joke about how they’re awful at pronunciation and please forgive them if they butcher your name. My name always gets butchered even though it’s really simple and looks exactly the way it sounds.

But I don’t not like this guy because he mispronounced my name. I don’t like him because of the names he didn’t even try on.

He went down the roll, calling people’s names and not doing such a bad job of getting it right. And then he just stopped.

“Oh no,” he groaned. “Here we go.” And then he stammered out the name of the first of several students from China and Taiwan.

If you’ve ever had class with international students, you know that a lot of them come prepared with English names. The student whose name he hacked to bits gave her English name, let’s say it was Sarah, and our professor breathed a sigh of relief.

“Oh thank goodness,” he says. “That is so much better! Really, thank you for that.” It didn’t stop there. The profuse thanks continued on for two more minutes. It was awkward.

And then he did it again. And again. And again. And again. Every time he got to one of the other students from China and Taiwan he groaned, and when given their English names he lauded them for uncomfortably long amounts of time.

But when he arrived at “Megan,” he said, “Okay, I want to get this right. Is it Meh-gan or ME-gan? I once had a girl in class that was emphatic about being her name being ME-gan, so which do you prefer? I want to get this right. I mean she was serious about it; it was ME-gan, not Meh-gan.”

This continued for several minutes.

What the hell? Lili, Zhou, and Zhang (those aren’t their names, but are close to them) have to change their names but you can spend 10 minutes debating whether it’s Meh-gan or ME-ghan? Do I even have to explain what this scenario implies about this man? Am I the only person here that sees the borderline xenophobic nature of his actions? Isn’t taking someone’s name the first step in taking their identity?

Beware, Lili, Zhou, and Zhang: you are now Toby and it only gets worse from there.

(Anyone who gets the reference is awesome.)