What’s In a Name?

Potentially a lot. Like, A LOT.

How we present ourselves and how we address each other are at the absolute core of our relationships. In a workplace, this can have huge implications for power dynamics, as well as feelings of belonging, safety, and expression. Identity is complex, but names aren’t: just use them.

There's a scene from the old TV series 30 Rock that I quote with some regularity, even to this day. Well, that’s true of a lot of scenes from that show, but there’s a particular one relevant here. It takes place between guest star Matthew Broderick, playing a George W. Bush White House staffer named (putatively) Cooter Burger, and Alec Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy. 

In this exchange, we learn that Cooter Burger’s name — the name by which he had introduced himself and has been referred to throughout the episode — is not what we think. Jack begins to address him and, exasperated, Cooter lashes out:

Cooter: “That’s not my name! My name is James Riley. Cooter Burger? What do you think I am, a cartoon dog? The president named me that.”

Jack: “He gave you two nicknames?”

Cooter: “Cooter because I look like a turtle. And Burger because he saw me eating a hamburger, one time! It wasn’t even a hamburger…it was a sandwich!”¹

The scene is gold. The chemistry between the actors is electric, the timing is impeccable, and it’s just great writing. 

In the show, the Jack character satirizes a certain kind of business executive whose behaviors include addressing people he deems worthy of respect by their last names (he almost always calls Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon “Lemon,” for example, but Kenneth the page is always “Kenneth”). 

This character would definitely be impressed and envious that someone had been “honored” with two nicknames from President Bush. And the suggestion that W. was the kind of leader who would randomly drop folksy, absurd, somewhat belittling nicknames on his team whether they liked it or not was just spot on satire.

That particular joke took aim at a 2000’s-era bro-topian cultural zeitgeist that I would have assumed (indeed, have been assuming!) hit its apotheosis in the era of the Bush presidency and then faded away. That kind of “nickname culture” was so silly, and so easily mocked, that surely nobody still pursues it, right? Besides, I don’t think I have experienced it much in the last twenty years of my own work life.²

With a few exceptions, I feel like in the workplace we’ve been generally calling each other by our actual names for a long time. Those exceptions I can think of have usually been to disambiguate between multiple people on the team with the same first names (so one of the Jennifers decides to go by “J Wo,” or one of the Mikes becomes “Mikey D,” and so forth).

However, maybe it never went away, and I’ve just been oblivious. Wouldn’t be the first time!

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This all came to mind reading The Good Boss (Kate Eberle Walker, 2021). I was generally struck, as I wrote in my Bookshelf entry on it, by the rather low bar it seemed to be setting with its nine suggestions for how “every manager can support women at work.” That’s no critique of the book — I was quite fond of it. It’s a critique that the bar really is that low!

The very first chapter is titled “Call Her By Her Name.” And the title is really the point: the chapter is about…well, actually addressing your coworkers by their names. I was incredulous that this has to be said. But it did get me thinking.

“Advanced Level: No Proactive Nicknames.”

The author’s discussion of nicknames and nickname culture is focused, of course, specifically on the particular impact they can have on women employees. She notes that in a culture of nicknaming, it’s not going to work to just not nickname the women.

“If you’re struggling with the formality of a no-nickname policy, or feeling self-conscious about not nicknaming women while you have an established pattern of nicknaming the men on your team, you might try the tactic of calling her by her last name.” 

Just like Jack!³

“Last names are one notable exception to the rules of nicknames. Being referred to only by your surname is widely viewed as a mark of respect and a signal of power.”

Being all that as it may, to me the suggestion nonetheless seems a little baroque. How about just calling everyone by their names? Does a “no-nickname policy” really seem overly formal? But, whatever. I have certainly experienced plenty of last-name addresses at work, and she uses this suggestion to make a couple of other key points. 

“Men are greater than 50 percent more likely to be called by their surnames at work. Students were 56 percent more likely to refer to a male professor by only his surname on Rate My Professors. Political pundits were 126 percent as likely to refer to men by their last names only on radio shows. Scientists identified by only their last names were considered 14 percent more worthy of receiving a National Science Foundation award.”

In this same chapter, the author also gets into the related, but distinct, use of “terms of endearment.” And this gets wild. Wow.

“Don’t use terms of endearment. That means no ‘dear,’ no ‘sweetheart.’ No ‘young lady.’ This one should be a given, but you’d be surprised.”

And so I was! Well…I mean, not surprised surprised, because…<gestures around> But still, surprised.

It’s not that I doubt it's true, and I’m aware it wouldn’t have happened to me: I am not, nor have I ever been, a woman at work. But I feel like I’ve seen a lot of the other bad behaviors in action, and I don’t recall this one. Most likely, I’ve just missed it — seems like it might not be that uncommon:

“A survey by research firm Hiscox found that 41 percent of managers think it's OK to use terms of endearment at work.” 

Yikes! Remember, this book is from 2021! This feels like some Mad Men-era foolishness.

“Regardless of whether intended to be affectionate or friendly, terms of endearment come off as condescending, disrespectful, and diminishing. It’s easy to steer clear of this land mine as a manager; unlike much of the advice to come in this book, in this case there is no need for nuance or judgment. Just never do it.”

I should say so. And again, is it so hard to just call folks by their name?

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Sometimes, of course, people prefer to go by a shortened or less formal version of their given name. Fair enough!

It’s a weird flex not to call someone by a diminutive they request. If I meet my new team member and they say, “My name is Elizabeth but I prefer to be called Lizzy,” and I respond, “Okay, Elizabeth,” that’s a super clumsy power move. Eyes will roll. Credibility will be lost. Lizzy it is.

Or if your name is Constantino and you ask to be called Stan, I might be inclined to wonder why. Maybe it’s because you want to Americanize it. Maybe you just want to make it shorter. Maybe you have some other reason entirely!

But you know what? Almost nothing could be less my business. As a generally curious person I may ponder to myself what the reason might be — for about a millisecond — but I’m certainly not going to ask or pursue it in any way. I will call you Stan, as requested.

But with all that said, I have faced situations that were a bit…dicier. For example (and here note this is highly anonymized, for obvious reasons), I meet my new team member and they introduce themselves: “My name is Elizabeth, but I like to go by Juicy.” 

What do I do with that? Surely I’m not going to address a professional colleague as “Juicy,” right?

Deciding whether to address a coworker the way they ask to be addressed has a self-evident, indisputable right answer that covers, say, 99.9% of all cases. Just do it! Deviating from this is so obviously wrong and bad and stupid…almost all the time.

Homophones can be tricky. 

Names that sound the same but are spelled differently can expose how much attention people are paying — or are willing to pay. 

If you go by Thom, your name’s going to get typed Tom sometimes; if you’re Stacey, you’ll probably see a Stacy or two. Kate, Cate, and Cait are in for it. A gentle correction ought to be enough to call the necessary attention to the problem. 

People make mistakes. Hopefully, we can all give each other a little grace when it comes to typos, misunderstandings, and assumptions. We’re all just trying to get through the world here.

But Eberle Walker brings up the case of her assistant, named Gabi. Gabi notes that seeing her name spelled “Gabby” in some circumstances “shows a carelessness and a lack of respect toward my individuality.” 

My knee-jerk reaction to that is it seems a little overcooked, doesn’t it? “Gabi” seems like a less-common spelling of a name more usually spelled “Gabby.” Is that simple misspelling really an insult to her “individuality”? 

But her point is that this happened in a Slack thread where her name was right there in the thread, and by longtime coworkers who should know better. Hard not to feel that’s disrespectfully careless at best, and downright mean-spirited at worst. Names are important.

Pronunciations and spellings can get especially tricky in a group that includes people from different ethnicities, cultural backgrounds, and language traditions. 

In American English, if you see someone’s name written as Jesus, you will almost certainly assume that it’s pronounced “Hey-soos,” and not “Gee-zus.” Even hearing the former, you’d probably spell it correctly. You’ll probably also spell and pronounce Uma more or less correctly, and Kenji, too. But what about Rae? Or Xiao? Or Chike?

The best we can do is pay attention, ask politely and respectfully for guidance, and try.

And think again about that “Juicy” example from above — what if that’s what I heard, but they were actually saying “Geussi?” 

And what if in the language they grew up speaking that was an affectionate honorific, and it had been bestowed upon them by a beloved grandparent. How is my recoiling at it (“My god, I’m not going to call you Juicy, are you crazy?”) going to make them feel about fitting in on my team? And should they have to explain their entire cultural and family history to me just to placate my delicate sensibilities?

Look, that’s an intentionally extreme (and totally made up) example…but, at the risk of de-anonymizing, it’s not nearly as far away as you might think from an actual experience I had. I’m not sure I ever really addressed the issue in a satisfactory way, either.

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I began my professional career as “Andy.” At some point I changed it to “Andrew.” I had a little rant about it (because of course I did).

“Andy,” I insisted, is simply a diminutive — it’s the same number of syllables, it does nothing to simplify or ease pronunciation, nothing to obscure (or highlight!) ethnicity or national origin. It’s just a kid’s version of the name, and I am an adult. 

You know who cared? No one. No one put up a fight. People who’d worked with me for a long time would slip occasionally, but only for a little while. Andy became Andrew, done.

Contrast that with what author and professor Minda Harts writes about feeling forced to go by Minda, even though her given name is Yassminda. “Minda” wasn’t an affectionate diminutive or a breezy hypocorism;⁴ she made the change because growing up she had run into so many people who thought her given name was weird or off-putting. 

“When I entered the workforce, I chose not to use Yassminda on my resume because of what I now realize to be an awareness and avoidance of bias. Back then, I had no idea what the hell bias was, but I had enough life experience to know that my full name made some white people uncomfortable.”

She then meditates a bit on whether or not she regrets making this change professionally, and how things might have worked out differently for her if she hadn’t. Obviously we don’t have a “control group” for life, and none of us can ever really know how any decision truly affected the world around us, or our own inner selves. 

But she comes to the conclusion that she’ll recommend others to push for what they really want, rather than allowing bias — or the fear of bias — to compromise their own sense of identity.

“If you’re one of those women with a ‘hard’ name, make everyone learn how to say it, if that’s what you prefer being called. The conscious and unconscious bias inflicted on women of color in the workplace factor directly into some of the decisions women of color have to make on whether or not they will ‘play the game’ with hopes of advancement or disrupt the rules and change the way the game is played! Unfortunately, something so simple like your name is part of how office politics work.  If I read one more essay on ‘bringing your full self to work’ by another white person, I think I might blow a gasket.”

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In American culture, women often change their last names when they get married (or divorced!); and occasionally men do, too. Sometimes a person will change their name to better reflect their gender expression, or because they’ve recently learned something about their birth parents’ ethnic background. 

I know people who have adopted a new religious practice and consequently changed their name, and people who have taken a new name to help distance themselves from a previous trauma. Some names are invented out of whole cloth when a family comes to a new country. 

On the other hand, some names represent long lineages, or deep cultural traditions. My own father is a “third” and I was nearly a “fourth” until he decided that tradition could stop with him.

The ease that I experienced changing from Andy to Andrew could very well have led me to believe that all such changes are easy, or that they’re generally done for similar reasons. Nobody has ever called me “sweetheart” at work, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen to others. And the fact that I’ve personally only had amusing nickname experiences at work certainly does not mean that’s true for everyone — even Cooter Burger was at the end of his rope!

Extrapolating from our own experiences is probably inevitable to some degree, but it’s always worth noting when it’s happening and trying to be conscious and intentional about it. Especially when it comes to something as fundamental as a person’s name.

How we address one another is one of the most intimate and vulnerable interactions we undertake, and in the workplace it can have enormous ramifications for power dynamics, a sense of belonging, even feelings of safety and security. For many people, there’s a lot of identity and authenticity tied up in their name. In the end, the reasons why don’t matter. The least we can do as managers and leaders is respect it.

How about you, dear reader? Have you had any particularly difficult (or successful!) experiences with naming in the workplace? Any classic nicknames, mortifying terms of endearment, or ridiculous misspellings? Leave a comment! It might very well be useful to someone else to hear the story.

1. This episode aired in May of 2008. I just re-watched it to find this quote, and…not all of it holds up that well. Don’t meet your heroes. Sigh.

2. Interestingly, the last time I personally experienced workplace nicknaming was back in the very early 2000’s — a coworker affectionately, but pointedly, dubbed me “Old Man Boyd” because I kept shushing them so often in the open-plan office space. I took no offense; indeed, to this day I own the domain name oldmanboyd.com. Though I do suppose it hits different in my fifties than it did in my thirties. Double sigh.

3. At the extreme risk of over-indexing on a dumb network sitcom from fifteen years ago, I do want to indulge a moment in this brilliant dynamic the show subtly created. The very fact that Jack Donaghy always referred to — and addressed — Liz Lemon as “Lemon,” while she virtually always referred to and addressed him as “Jack,” was kind of groundbreaking. He called all of the other regular characters by their first names: Tracy, Jenna, Frank, Jonathan, Kenneth, etc. The joke was that he thought Liz was a mess, but here he was, addressing her in the most respectful way he knew how. And it was pretty jarring (read: funny) in those days to hear a woman referred to by her last name like that. Tina Fey created the show — she knew what she was doing.

4. That’s a word I just learned researching this essay!