{"id":631,"date":"2021-06-01T08:48:53","date_gmt":"2021-06-01T06:48:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/roladesocietalblog.com\/?p=631"},"modified":"2021-06-01T08:48:54","modified_gmt":"2021-06-01T06:48:54","slug":"whats-behind-a-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/roladesocietalblog.com\/?p=631","title":{"rendered":"What’s behind a name?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
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I facilitate an English roundtable in\nLuxembourg every Friday, and we discuss professional, social and personal-interest\ntopics. Last month, it was about names; one of the participants mentioned a\ngirl initially called Nutella, a popular hazelnut chocolate spread. I checked\nit out and came across a Guardian’s article about a couple from Valenciennes in\nnorthern France who registered their daughter Nutella ( https:\/\/www.theguardian<\/a>\n.com\/world\/2015\/jan\/26\/french-couple-name-girl-nutella seen on 04\/052021). The\nregistrar alerted the local prosecutor, who referred the case to a family court\njudge. The court ruled that Nutella is a commercial brand and such a name was\nagainst the girl’s interests as it would cause “mockery or disobliging\nremarks”. The couple had to rename her Ella, which means a pleasant young\nwoman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Ms Catharine Smith (https:\/\/www.huffpost.com\/entry\/baby-named-facebook-egypt_n_825934<\/a>\nseen 04\/05\/21), an Egyptian father, Jamal Ibrahim, named his daughter “Facebook”\nto honour the social media site’s role in Egypt’s revolution. Ms Smith quoted\nthis from TechCrunch newspaper: “A young man in his twenties wanted to\nexpress his gratitude about the victories the youth of 25th of January have\nachieved and chose to express it in the form of naming his firstborn girl “Facebook”.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Marcio’s Italian family, all the\nchildren’s names start with the letter M. \nAccording to Marie-Pierre, her name’s male version is Pierre-Marie. The\nArabic name Shadi means happiness. Do names reflect an individual’s\npersonality? There are studies that show names make a difference in professional,\nsocial and financial standing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My late uncle was Silverio Carangan, Sr. My cousins’ legal names are Silverio Carangan 1st, Silverio Carangan 2nd, and Silverio Caranagan 3rd; to everyone, they’re Ono, Dos, Tres. \u00a0I was already eight months pregnant, and my hubby and I couldn’t agree on a name for our firstborn. We decided to play chess; I won two out of three games and had the privilege of naming him Sidney<\/em>, which is easy to pronounce in almost all languages. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My late parents, Roberto and Adela, named their first daughter Rodela; from this, they came up with four other names by rearranging the letters, and mine was one of them. If you know of another person with the same name as mine, please notify me. So far, the closest is Rolande and Rolanda, which are both of Latin origin and mean “known in the land”. My French acquaintances call me “Rolad” (\/ru\u02d0\u02c8l\u0251\u02d0d), as the last vowel is not pronounced in the French language. They also have a dish roulade<\/em> (\/ru\u02d0\u02c8l\u0251\u02d0d) de boeuf<\/em>“, which is a filled rolled meat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

S.J. Velasquez’s 2018 write-up spoke about nominative determinism, a theory that people are drawn to jobs matching their names, e.g. Baker for a pastry chef and Dennis or Denise for dentists (https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/worklife\/article\/20180404-do-our-names-push-us-toward-certain-jobs<\/a>). Two weeks ago, I grinned watching the French television station TF1’s interview of a restaurateur Didier Desert (“Desert” is pronounced by English speakers as ‘d\u026a\u02c8z\u0259\u02d0t’ (dessert – a sweet course eaten at the end of the main meal, e.g. cheesecake or chocolate mousse).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you had a funny, weird or embarrassing name, would you change it? If your family name was Head, would you keep your first name Dick knowing that dickhead means a stupid or ridiculous man? You are probably one of those who would go through all the legal fuss to do so.\u00a0 Many people, however, never change their names. Are there names that employers find, either subconsciously or sentimentally, attractive or ugly? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms St\u00e9phanie Thomson’s article revealed\nthe Canadian Ryerson University and University of Toronto’s finding that people\nwith Chinese, Indian or Pakistani-sounding names were 28% less likely to get job\ninterviews than the fictitious candidates with English-sounding names, even\nwhen they had the same qualifications (https:\/\/www.weforum.org\/agenda\/2017\/05\/job-applications-resume-cv-name-descrimination\/).\nMs Thomson also mentioned a French government’s conclusion that employers were\nless likely to interview candidates with North African-sounding names.\nLikewise, in the UK, “an all-parliamentary group study from 2012 found\nthat women who ‘whitened’ their names or made them sound more British had to\nsend only half as many applications before being invited to interview as those\nwho sounded foreign”, she wrote.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Has our society progressed in terms of\naddressing bias and discrimination associated with names? Have you had a good\nor bad experience because of your name? What’s behind your name?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I facilitate an English roundtable in Luxembourg every Friday, and we discuss professional, social and personal-interest topics. Last month, it was about names; one of the participants mentioned a girl initially called Nutella, a popular hazelnut chocolate spread. I checked it out and came across a Guardian’s article about a couple from Valenciennes in northern … Continue reading What’s behind a name?<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[72,25,1,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-career-and-employment","category-language","category-social-political-cultural-economic-issues","category-society"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/roladesocietalblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/roladesocietalblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/roladesocietalblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roladesocietalblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roladesocietalblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=631"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/roladesocietalblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":633,"href":"https:\/\/roladesocietalblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631\/revisions\/633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/roladesocietalblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roladesocietalblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roladesocietalblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}