Hot Take (002) : Call Me By My Name
Who gets to decide what you’re called ? Is it you, or is it the world ?
"As part of a multipronged debugging effort in 1984, a GO TO sub-routine was inserted in all Personnel systems’ FILE sections: In cases of what appeared to be two different employees with the same name and IRS Post code, the system was now directed to recognize only the ‘John Q. Doe’ of higher GS grade. This led pretty much directly to the snafu at IRS Post 047 in May 1985. In effect, David F. Wallace, GS-9, age twenty, of Philo IL, did not exist; his file had been deleted, or absorbed into, that of David F. Wallace, GS-13, age thirty-nine, of Rome NY’s Northeast REC. This absorption occurred at the instant that David F. Wallace (I.e., the GS-13)’s Regional Transfer Form 140(c)-RT and posting Form 141-PO were generated, which instant two different systems administrators in the Northeast and Midwest Regions would eventually have to go back through a combined 2,110,000 lines of recorded code in order to find and override the GO TO absorption. None of this, of course, was explained in any detail to David F. Wallace (GS-9, formerly GS-13—meaning the David F. Wallace of Philo IL) until much later, after the whole administrative swivet was over and various outlandish charges had been retracted.”
David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
What you’re about to read is a lengthy string of words about the omission of a single letter and why it rattles me.
My name is Kimi, not Kim. In fairness, I really was Kim once, up until August 2011. As a child, I was accustomed to my mother calling me Kimi as an affectionate nickname (my brother was Coco) even though she permitted the world to refer to me as Kim, since she technically named me after Kim Wilde, the one-hit wonder responsible for “Kids in America”. In the only instance of multiples I encountered, in high school, not-me Kim - who was one grade below me - was christened Lil’ Kim, making me, by default, Big Kim. I reluctantly embraced this unflattering title, aware I was still largely spared the mix-ups and name-plus-patronymic treatment of other girls with ubiquitous American names. There was also the unfortunate long-running joke that I would marry one of the Korean boys in my grade and ascend to my final form as Kim Kim. That’s high school for you.
Then, at sixteen, I spent the summer living in Romania with my aunt and cousins. It was there, after many days of eating sour cherry compote to stay cool in the austere Soviet-style apartment blocs, where I strangled Kim and left her floating in the salt pools at Ocna Șugatag. When I returned to American soil in late August, I was effectively reborn (Larry and I like to estimate our ages according to our current selves - by these mathematics, I am only eleven years old).
Only a select few people who knew my past self as familiarly as my present (Ben, Julia, and Sarah) get to conjure her. Everyone else is expected to get with the program. Although it sounds slightly unnatural, even my brother came around to calling me Kimi in time. It’s my way of wearing my Romanian heritage like a necklace so it doesn’t get lost.
That was the initial pretense of the decision to change my name, at least. Beneath the familial intimacy and cultural significance are also an auditory pleasantness and functional linguistic superiority that make Kimi sound good to my ear and brain, and Kim sound like the scraping of metal on metal. Kim is harsh with a crunchy, curt vowel in the center. The monosyllable makes it sound compressed, rushed. Adding the i at the end lengthens it into a leisurely duosyllable, and changing that first i to more of an ‘ee’ sound makes it phonetic to most people whose native language isn’t English. I actually like the sound of ‘Keemee’ more than the way English speakers still say ‘Kim-mi’ with the hard i, because few languages end syllables with hard consonant sounds like M or N, making Kim sound like there’s an empty slot at the end where an airy vowel should be. I first noticed the difference in how both permutations of the name translate during my one year of high school Japanese (the year immediately following the Romania trip), where it was the difference between Kimi (キミ) and the more challenging Kimu (キム), and I noticed this pattern extending to most Romance languages too. Lastly, the appearance of the two dots is slightly twee, giving Kimi a cutesy, inoffensive quality (so much so that during one of my college work-study jobs, I had a supervisor who refused to call me Kimi because she claimed it sounded ‘diminutive’). If a name is a window into one’s personality, I felt more aggressive as Kim, and becoming Kimi was like adding a dash of sugar.
Even further beneath the linguistics, I have a deep desire to be sui generis, to be singularly recognized as the only me in the world. My last name accomplishes this to some degree, but not enough. I want to be like Zendaya or Beyoncé, so notorious that no one even has to know my last name. In the interminable sea of famous Kims, I can name on one hand the number of Kimi references in popular media : the recent eponymous movie starring Zoë Kravitz, the show Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (which only halfway counts on account of the spelling), Kimi Ni Todoke (a manga series which means ‘From Me to You’ in Japanese), and a Finnish Formula One racecar driver named Kimi Räikkönen who also goes by ‘Iceman’. This wasn’t something my mom could have necessarily predicted when naming me, but I bristle at the thought of anyone’s brain associating me with Kim Kardashian, Kim Jong-Un, Lil’ Kim, or the Eminem song “Kim”, etc.
Regrettably, the universe won’t let me be great, and the cost of being singular is that it comes with a learning curve. A few years ago, I worked on a team that also included a Kim and a Kimberly, and the perplexing emails we each received (because they were meant for someone else) were perpetual, not to mention very annoying. This is compounded by the fact my brain does not register that a message erroneously addressed to Kim could possibly be meant for me. When Ben or Julia or Sarah mention me in third person, I wonder for a split-second if they’re talking about Lil’ Kim from high school. Thankfully I can’t say I ever missed anything critical because of this, but I have noticed it becoming increasingly frequent in my inbox of late (and because I am a quintessential type-A, here is a chart of precisely how frequent it is) :
Mind you, I don’t have a good baseline estimate for how often one can expect to be correctly named in correspondences, but as much as it may seem like a petty annoyance, it begs the question : who gets to decide what you’re called ? Is it you, or is it the world ? I chose the name Kimi because it’s meaningful to me, and everyone with a name ostensibly has a good reason for having it, whether it has relevance to one’s culture or family or gender identity or whether it just sounds cool. Why, when all the clues are out in the open about how you want to be addressed, would someone still get it wrong, and at what error threshold are you allowed to get disgruntled about it ?
Some people claim not to be intrinsically good with names. This excuse sounds fake to me as a person with a freakishly near-eidetic memory for names (no, really, if I had one college class with you eight years ago and I saw you on the street today, I will probably still remember your name although I would do my darnedest to feign that I don’t), but it turns out, based on the way human memory works, there is some validity to this. Similarly, in contrast to the hordes of ‘visual learners’ out there, I have always been an ‘aural learner’ whose memory is enhanced by intaking information in the form of words rather than pictures, and this might actually help explain the freakishly near-eidetic memory for names thing, since names are aural and tend to stay in short-term memory without repeated exposure.
However … the keyword here is repeated exposure. Everyone gets a grace period of, say, two misnomers, after which the failure to attend to email signatures, other people’s messages and vocalizations, and/or my own petty correction attempts signals a broader problem. Plus, both Outlook and Gmail have predictive text settings, so there’s no need to even risk all the other common analog slip-ups, such as your brain defaulting to Kim because you went to high school with one years ago, or the classic ‘slip of the finger/hit Enter too soon’ oopsie.
People will usually claim it’s a harmless attentional slip, but I’m skeptical of that defense. By studying behavior change research, I’ve come to learn that while education is a potentially useful tool, it is usually not potent enough to drive sustained behavior change, which is why psychoeducation is often relegated to either a control group or the introductory module of a more complicated intervention. In other words, just because someone becomes aware of an error they’ve made does not necessarily mean they will fix the error in the future. The same is true for addressing racism or other systemic disparities - in his book “The Conversation” (which is a really great synthesis on the psychological aspect of antiracism work), Robert Livingston lays out the PRESS model, which posits that raising awareness of the problem is only the first step in undoing racist attitudes; after that, there is the equally important hurdle of getting people to care about the problem in a way that resonates with their personal values. Ergo, correcting someone when they get your name wrong is not enough to get them to call you by your preferred name unless they care about you beyond bare minimum cordiality.
I suppose the reason I get so worked up about this is that if I can only reliably expect a 78% chance of my interlocutors adding a measly goddamn extra i, I can’t imagine what anyone without a picket-fence Anglicized name has to put up with. There are plenty of infuriating stories about immigrants having to compress or warp their names because a U.S. customs official couldn’t taste it right, and this is partly the result of a Western cultural norm that a small set of names with Biblical origin are ‘universal’ and everything else slightly aberrant. J.J. McCullough has a wonderful video about how this norm still impedes how we process names we are unfamiliar with in both writing and speech :
“Overall, the idea of translating names has largely fallen out of fashion these days, mostly because it comes off as very chauvinistic and arrogant, but the bigger problem is that even when Westerners write a more phonetically accurate version of a foreign name, we are still not writing it completely authentically, since we are still limited by the constraints of our beloved Roman alphabet. Even in the West itself, the Roman alphabet is often quite decidedly unhelpful for clearly communicating names, and this is because so many different European countries all use different pronunciation systems for the various letters and combinations thereof; simply seeing the word in Roman letters doesn’t communicate anything of use to the reader without first knowing how pronunciation works in the country that that person comes from. For a lot of names that are written in the Roman alphabet, we are thus playing a funny sort of game in which we treat them as if they were ordinary words, even though in practice, they are functioning more like abstract symbols that just coincidentally happen to take the form of our letters. In many ways, this actually makes many European names harder to pronounce than Chinese ones, since at least Chinese names still get the phonetic treatment, something that would seem incredibly condescending to do to another language that uses the Roman alphabet. At best, you just recognize the collection of symbols as a foreign name and have to look up and memorize how it’s pronounced. In a way, a foreign name can almost be like a pictogram, something you never really learned to read in a phonic sense but just identify. The only real difference is that the use of the Roman alphabet creates a thin veneer of familiarity or even false hope of comprehension to all these foreign names, even when they are hardly any more intuitively readable than ones written in Russian Cyrillic.”
The seed of this rant originated while I was working at a coffee shop a few years ago, seeing the mental calculations some customers would do when I’d ask for a name for their order, the jolt upright when they realized the barista had been calling out the false moniker they’d momentarily forgotten to keep track of, while every Dan or Chris could scoop their latte off the counter without having to consider any of this. And there were a few times when regulars would explicitly tell me they kept coming back precisely because we were the only local watering hole that made the effort to try and get it right. It crystallized my conviction that everyone is entitled to having their name spelled and pronounced correctly by others, period. Everyone already works with or knows someone with a nontraditional name that goes ungarbled, because their peers who respect and admire them set an implicit expectation that their misattribution percentage must not dip below Dan or Chris. This is one extremely simple way to advance diversity and inclusion in your surroundings, only it doesn’t net you any clout tokens on social media. In the increasingly multicultural world we operate in, this is just how it should be.
In grappling with this dilemma myself, I thought a lot about how to handle it. My first instinct, admittedly, was to list the repeat offenders and passive-aggressively misname them once every 4.5 emails (I did not actually do this). In reality, I complained to pretty much everyone, had a brief existential spiral about whether to just resign myself to going by Kim again, and ultimately did get slightly punctilious about correcting people. I do think my misattribution percentage has dipped somewhat over time as people are getting to know me better.
To be fair, I do subconsciously hold the world to the same standard for freakish near-eidetic memory as my own – I recently took an Insights test, and although most personality typing stuff is pop psych mumbo-jumbo in my opinion, my Insights profile had its foot firmly on my neck when it said I “live by a rather strict set of rules, expecting others to do so as well” and “encourage and push others to achieve a high standard of performance, impatient with what [I] may see as inefficiency and incompetence”. As a result, I’m working on giving people a little more grace. I'm still a strong proponent of the Coffee Shop Principle, and while I will continue to aggressively and prescriptively correct people when they botch anyone else’s name, I also still let my hairdresser call me Kimmie – it doesn’t accost my brain so severely and it’s not Kim, so I think I can let it slide.
Watching : Umbrella Academy S3 • Chungking Express • Big Mouth S5 • Hable Con Ella (Talk To Her) • Little Fires Everywhere • Fire Island
Listening : Get to Heaven (Everything Everything) • “Gata Să Mor” (Oscar) • “Peaches” (In the Valley Below) • You Can’t Kill Me (070 Shake) • “Cinema” (Harry Styles) • “Special” & “Loved You A Little” (Charlotte Sands) • “Legend Has It” (Run the Jewels) • “Disappear” (Motion City Soundtrack)
Reading : The Pale King (David Foster Wallace) • The Idiot (Elif Batuman) • Little Fires Everywhere (Celeste Ng)