Name, Please

Christopher Key, on his Salon blog The Barbaric Yawp, has written a nice meditation on how people tend to shorten his name.  Most people call him “Chris,” which he strongly dislikes. I know how he feels. 

I call it “the used car salesman syndrome,” as that is the class of people most likely to shorten your name to a familiar form without asking permission.  This is the sort of person who is likely to shorten my name to three letters, or — even worse — will add two more letters to those three and add a “y”.  I might not even show up for dinner if you call me one of these variants.

According to The American Heritage Dictionary, my name is related to Jacob, which transliterates to mean "(God) has protected."  Well, I suppose that explains how I have managed to survive to this point!

But my given name has a history beyond that:  I received my first name from my paternal grandfather, William James C—.  His middle name derives from his mother's maiden name; my paternal great-grandmother was born Elizabeth James.  His first name came from one of Elizabeth's brothers, William, who reportedly wrote philosophical books.

If I know my intended audience at all, I suspect you're shaking your heads and saying “Surely he's not claiming to be related to William James!”  Well, honestly, I'm not.  I think it would be way cool if I were, but I have absolutely no documentation or research to support such a claim.  While Elizabeth was about the right age to be in the famous James family; and while Henry and William did have a sister named Elizabeth, I can't quite figure out why a lady of New England Brahmin extraction
would marry my great-grandfather Mark and move to the wilds of Texas.

Even before I was aware of this history, I insisted on being called my given name.  This was true from the time I could speak, and is a rare instance of assertiveness.

Folk have suggested that this insistence on being called my given name makes me seem formal and unfriendly.  Well, I don't believe my given name is any harder to say than the three-letter version, and it's even easier to say than the version that ends in "y" — since my given name is one syllable and the "y"-ending variation is two syllables.

As I said above, the most likely people to use the familiar form of a name are used car salesmen.  The intent is to gain your trust by seeming like a long-lost friend.  Therefore, I don't trust a person who uses the familiar form of my name within the first few minutes of meeting me.  Nine times out of ten, that person is trying to sell me something.