Naming etiquette
Over at Language Log, they’re discussing whether people should be expected to use non-standard orthography for other people’s names. Bill Poser says no; SC responds and comes to no obvious conclusion.
I think the answer is obvious. You can think what you want about non-standard spellings, but in general, common courtesy means you call people what they want to be called. In text, this means writing their name as they write it (as well as using the name they want: etiquette does not require you to refer to couples as Mr. & Mrs. Husband if Mrs. Husband goes by Ms. Wife). I actually think that beginning of a sentence is an exception to the “please no capital letters” — danah boyd capitalises ‘I’ only when it comes at the beginning of a sentence, which strikes me as reasonable; I have assumed she would do the same with her name, though I am not sure.
If you have a non-standard name, then fine, expect mistakes in spelling or pronunciation (someone named Jeanne, for instance, will likely need to get used to being called Jean or Jeannie a lot if they leave French-speaking areas. How did you pronounce that name in your head?). But then you politely point out that you spell your name however you spell it, or you pronounce it however you pronounce it, and people politely fix it, instead of nattering on about how it’s a convention and thus entirely not up for debate or examination by defying them.
January 18th, 2005 at 2:00 pm
Hear, hear! I find it very odd that Poser says that one has “no ethical obligation” to respect a preference for lowercase, because I don’t see this as a question of ethics; I think you’re exactly right to characterize it as a matter of courtesy. It would cost Poser nothing to defer to bell hooks and lowercase her name; if he stands on his right to capitalize it, this is not unethical, but surely it is pointlessly discourteous?
January 18th, 2005 at 4:06 pm
Oh, incorrect spellings of my (real) name is one of my pet peeves, and my name is a common one, spelled in the simplest way possible. It’s like people have this perverse desire to assume that “Rana” must really be “Rahnah” or “Rannah” or “Rannawh” or something.
I can see that encountering upper or lower case letters where one doesn’t expect them can cause a momentary mental stutter, but, really, if Prince can go around for several years as a symbol and EarthFirst! can demand the exclamation point be included, and we can grasp that an iMac is meant to have that lower case letter at the beginning, we can do the same with names. Sheesh.
Hmm. I wonder if there’s something generational in play here?
January 18th, 2005 at 4:32 pm
Since I think we do have an ethical obligation to be courteous (to a certain extent), I think I disagree with you somewhat. People feel very strongly about their names, and deliberately saying that “Well, I think orthographic conventions are more important” is not just needless discourtesy but needless rudeness and arrogance.
I don’t mind when people accidentally misspell my name, or assume it’s the longer form — it happens quite rarely, but I correct it, we’re all done. I’m not offended, they’re not defensive. They don’t fight about it, or say I should really spell it this way.
I don’t know what causes this sort of response. Off all things to insist are untouchable, the conventions of capitalisation of proper names and use-of-apostrophes in written English seem one of the least reasonable.
January 18th, 2005 at 6:37 pm
I suspect that if there’s anything we disagree about here, it’s the lexical semantics of the word ethics; I’m really not sure where (or, now that you mention it, whether) to draw the line between ethics and courtesy.
January 18th, 2005 at 6:58 pm
Oh, yes, I meant that, too, but I was at work and tired. Sorry. I think ethics is much bigger than courtesy, and sometimes — as always — one right thing to do will trump another, and certainly the capitalisation of names is easily trumped, but I can’t think of a good reason it would need to be.
To behave ethically requires behaving courteously (when at all possible etc). There is a distinction, in a way, but it’s also a distinction without a difference.
The world will not end if you write someone’s name without capital letters. Really. I still have my fifteen-and-hate-the-world signature where, yes, I sign my name without capital letters. (It’s such an illegible scrawl that no one could ever tell, but it’s the case.) English orthography has managed to survive that.
January 18th, 2005 at 10:53 pm
Courtesy and Capitalization
Someone (okay, okay, it was Bill Poser) let stodgy prescriptivism out into Language Log: Capitalization is part of the social…
January 19th, 2005 at 6:43 am
I never heard of anyone spelling their name with the lower case first. Not that there’s anything wrong with it. Does it have an origin from another country or is it something that’s developed. People are always spelling my real name wrong even when they’ve spelt it correctly a hundred times previously. It’s a bit annoying.
January 19th, 2005 at 7:53 am
I agree that common courtesy requires us to accomodate people in the pronunciation and spelling of their names. I think it may be because of my own experience. You see, I have some rather particular rules with respect to my name that I insist people follow, lest I be offended:
1) All the consonants in my name should be capitalized except for the first letter if it occurs and the beginning of a sentence; in any other location, all the consonants except the first should be in lower case, and all the vowels should have umlauts added.
2) When spoken aloud at the beginning of an intonational phrase, all the consonants in my name should be pronounced voiced; in any other location, all the consonants should be pronounced unvoiced. Of course, the presentation pronunciation of my name, which retains all the original voicing distinctions, should be used if someone within earshot is unfamiliar with these rules—but only once, and then these rules should be explained to them.
Thanks to everyone for your cooperation—it’s very courteous of you.
January 19th, 2005 at 11:49 am
You’re welcome, Thë tënsör ;)
January 19th, 2005 at 2:46 pm
I only know one person whose name is uncapitalized; I write it the way she prefers. But I went to high school with a guy who insisted on being Peter! and I would have no part of that.
I wonder what Poser would think of my spelling my name with an Å„ (I hope the Mac pasted that in correctly; it should be an n with an acute accent) instead of an n. While Roman, Å„ is not an English letter.
Moving from people-names to place-names: Why has Kraków been respelled in English as Cracow?
January 20th, 2005 at 9:10 am
I would guess that Poser is fine with using non-standard alphabets. Why are they different? Because the word isn’t English?
Word-internal punctuation’s a little odder (apostrophes are at least normally word-internal), but what the hell. I just reserve the right to privately make fun of anyone who uses punctuation as part of their name. I’ll spell it how you want, even with excessive y’s and randomly doubled letters.
Wasn’t Cracow once spelled (in English) with at least one k? Is it not still? Krakow? Crakow? Kracow? I think Krakow. I forget.
January 20th, 2005 at 10:37 am
I’m not 100% sure on how the Cracow/Krakow issue breaks down. What I’ve observed is that Poles writing in Polish use Kraków and that the same Poles writing in English use Cracow. I think I’ve seen both spellings used by Americans writing in English (of course with o instead of ó, but you know what I mean).
January 20th, 2005 at 2:46 pm
Hmm. I’ll respect people’s wishes to be called (in speech and in print) what they want, but I must say I was underwhelmed by danah’s explanation for why she isn’t Danah; that among other things, she “always thought it was quite self-righteous” to capitalize names and nothing else - ” i was told that the world does not revolve around me, yet our written culture is telling me something entirely different.” And her response to this is…writing a page about herself and her name and why she went out of her way to make it special and different from all of the other names. Hmm. With nearly all other names in the English language capitalized, it’s a lot less self-righteous to leave your own as-is than it is to demand special treatment on political grounds, methinks. And I confess that when I see names that begin with lowercase letters, my gut reaction isn’t “clever, principled subversive”, it’s “illiterate”.
January 21st, 2005 at 9:29 pm
I decided I had more to say about this.
September 8th, 2006 at 10:57 am
[…] I’m always wary when anybody makes an assertion about what “should not be offensive” to someone else. Sure, Poser has a right to write Bell Hooks if he wants to—but bell hooks has every right to be pissed off if he does. I think wolfangel’s post on the matter takes the most sensible attitude: refusing to lowercase bell hooks is a discourtesy, and to the extent that we have an ethical obligation to be courteous, we have an ethical obligation to comply with hooks’s preference for lowercase letters. There are some fairly obvious ways in which the strength of this obligation varies: when Poser writes Ms. Hooks on Language Log, this is not nearly as discourteous as it would be in the salutation of a letter addressed to hooks herself. But I think wolfangel has effectively settled the ethical question, so I’d like to take a closer look at the linguistic question. […]