What’s in a name?

To the Editor

Palmerston North Girls’ High School recently ran a campaign in which all teachers were expected to learn from each student in their class how to pronounce their names correctly. Considering that some Palmy schools have children from more than 40 nationalities, it must have been a Herculean task for the teachers, but the students and the parents greatly appreciated it.

I was reminded of this campaign while attending the recent RANZCP International Congress. While introducing one of the keynote speakers, the introducer announced the first syllable of his first name, and then unsure how to pronounce the rest, went on to his last name. Then, the speaker after him also called him by his truncated first name.

Late I met the Speaker and asked him how he felt about being called by an incorrect first name. I told him why I was asking. When I had first gone to the United Kingdom in the late 1990s to do my postgraduate training, I had been told that my name was too difficult to pronounce so I will have to come up with a simpler first name. I had replied, ‘If I can make an effort to pronounce your name correctly, I expect you to do the same’.

The Speaker and I traded some funny, and some not so funny, stories about our experiences with our names. He basically told me that he had accepted that that is the way it is going to be, and there was nothing he could do about it. The most heartbreaking story he told me was that one long-term colleague mistook a paper as being authored by him just because he had never known his full first name, to which he had replied, ‘I know all of us look the same to you but please read the full name first next time’.

I have coined a new term for this phenomenon which is ‘Nominal Colonialism’. It goes like this, ‘You are now in MY country mate. Do not expect me to waste time on learning to pronounce your foreign-sounding, unfamiliar name. Change it to something simple that I can say easily’. I just wonder if colleagues realize how unfair it is to coerce other colleagues into simplifying their names, or to keep calling them with wrong, truncated or altered names.

Maybe the RANZCP can learn a thing or two about cultural diversity from Palmerston North Girls’ High School.