My full first name is Joshua, but when I was a kid everyone would just call me Josh. That was until 5th grade, when another Josh joined my class, and whose last name just happened to come right before mine in the roll call. I loathed that he "stole" my name and (in my head) made me sound like the repeat, so from that point on I decided that I would be Joshua because it sounded "fancier" to me. Years later, my choir teacher would sing that old "Joshua fought the battle of Jericho" song whenever he passed me in the hallways, which always made me laugh.
replyI've got a life long friend who's full first name is Josh, derived from the Japanese name Yosh. People often try to call him Joshua and it annoys the hell out of him.
replyYosh would always be an abbreviation in Japanese. And only done for foreigners, not for other Japanese.
replyYoshihiro or Yoshiyuki would likely be called Yoshi by their friends.
deleted
replyYou’re for sure right about the name thing. It’s so hard to resist commenting on names for a lot of people, I think, due to the extreme asymmetry of novelty. When you meet someone named Michael Jackson, that’s such novel information to you: “there’s a guy right here in front of me who is named the same thing as a famous musician!” Meanwhile, from Michael’s perspective, they’ve been named Michael Jackson and getting comments and jokes about it near-daily for 35 years - and it’s really a boring non-story - they’re named after their grandfather, their parents didn’t care about the other Michael Jackson one way or the other, and they themselves also neither like or hate MJ.
replyThis is like when you're working retail and the scanner glitches or the barcode isn't registered and the customer says "I guess that one's free then!" and you have to say "ha ha, very droll sir" as if you didn't hear that same joke yesterday.
reply> you have to say "ha ha, very droll sir"
replyI completely support the defensive adoption of a sardonic butler-persona for everybody on the other side of a cash-register. :p
They might like to hear "Michael Jackson? Like the guy who wrote the book about scotch??" once in a while
replyI had a friend named Michael Jackson who went by a different first name. I didn't even know until several years later when he showed a group of us his drivers license and accidentally outed himself.
replyLike the Michael Bolton character in Office Space.
replyMichael... Bolton?
replyThis is 100% what I was thinking of, I considered using that name in my comment actually!!
reply"Well, you could go by Mike instead of Michael."
reply"Why should I have to change? He's the one who sucks!"
Yeah, you also have to remember that someone has heard every possible joke about their name and their appearance a million times.
replyI do think Dale Carnegie overemphasizes the importance of saying people's names, and in fact saying people's names in conversation often sounds forced and manipulative, but maybe that's just a cultural shift over the past century.
I've got the same last name as a sitcom character from the 1980s. I used to get so tired of people pointing that out. Luckily nobody really remembers the show anymore, let alone the character.
replyBut, yeah, it usually sets off my spidey sense when somebody keeps using my first name in conversation. It's just seems weirdly unnecessary, so it makes me wonder why they're doing it.
I don’t have any problem with my name, and it feels manipulative and overfamiliar and I assume someone’s trying to Carnegie me into something if they use it.
replyDoc Rivers is an awesome name though.
Saying someone's name back to them is also a memory trick to help yourself remember their name for next time.
reply