A high school senior nervously waits backstage at an academic awards night. As an introvert, she avoids the limelight and devotes her time to books and learning. Her name is about to be called. This moment is one she has been working towards, one she will fondly look back on when her grades plummet after dating that boy in the denim vest in her college years. Her name is called, but at the same time, it feels like it was never called. The pronunciation was mercilessly botched. She walks across the stage, her face redder than the cover of her calculus notebook. The moment that she was supposed to be remembered for is now the moment where she has felt the most forgotten.
Now that I have made you feel fictitious sympathy for a nameless character, let us talk about acknowledging said honor student. Take five seconds to learn how to correctly pronounce her name. There is a difference between noting a name tag at a social function and actually learning an individual's name. Any ex-president can write out "nuclear," but true knowledge is knowing the word is pronounced "noo-kyoo-ler." "noo-klee-er."
Why should we correctly pronounce people's names? Respect, you jerk. Articulating someone's name is a sign of respect; mangling it is like kicking their beloved childhood pet while issuing them an eviction notice. Is it okay if you do not get it right the first time? Absolutely. However, once you are corrected, you should not mispronounce that person's name again (unless it is out of jest, which brings us back to you being a jerk).
At the risk of sounding like Clint Eastwood's character in "Gran Torino," grumbling at adolescents while holding a shotgun with his trousers up to his collarbone, I would like to bring up something relevant to this topic that irks me. I cannot stand when people apathetically botch an individual's name because it is foreign. I get this sometimes with my last name, Guilfoyle (pronounced Gill-foil), which is Irish for heaven's sake. This is essentially nothing compared to the butchery done to African and Asian surnames. As someone who has taken Arabic, I understand there are sounds in some languages that are not found in others (glottal stops are fun!), but not even bothering to learn someone's name just because the name is from a different culture is nothing short of discrimination and hypocrisy. Newsflash, y'all: we were all immigrants at one point. If we can memorize names like Charlemagne, Neitzsche, and Rachmaninoff, why do we reject names like Nguyen, Ejiofor, and Nyong'o? Just because a language barrier exists does not mean we have to erect an intellectual barrier.
Now if you will excuse me, I have to deal with some teenagers trampling my snapdragons.
