According to William Shakespeare "That which we call a rose. By any other name would smell as sweet". (Said by Romeo, to Juliet)
In other words, the specific name doesn't matter.
But I think perhaps Will missed the boat on this one. (Before you start lambasting me in the comments, I realize that Shakespeare was just trying to make a point.... and now, so am I!)
At first blush, it feels like most people don't have a choice in their name. Parents choose a name when a child is born, it goes on the birth certificate, and there you go.
But that's not really quite accurate.
I know someone who, as a child, decided she didn't like her first name (which was a perfectly fine name), and insisted that everyone call her by her middle name. And she was amazingly adept at refusing to respond - or even react - if someone called her by her first name. At some point, she reverted back to her first name. I'm not sure about the reasoning behind her initial decision to change, or the decision to change back. But the point is, she changed her name.
Beyond that, most of us are able to choose whether to use our formal name, or a shortened/modified nickname. When we introduce ourselves to someone, we're choosing which name we want them to use. When I meet somebody who tells me their name is John, or Johnny, or Jack, I make some immediate assumptions about what sort of person they are. Those assumptions might be wrong, they might be right... but I make those assumptions nonetheless, based on the name they give me.
Yet all of these are examples of first names. What about last names?
Here's where I think it's interesting how people react. For centuries, when a couple married, the woman 'lost' her last name and took on her new husband's last name. Back in the 1970's and '80's, there was something of a trend was for the woman to put a hyphen after her last name, and add her husband's name. A nice compromise, you might think, particularly where some husbands would change their last name to the new hybrid version. But it still meant that the woman (and man, if he joined in) 'lost' her last name.
And then there were the variations of shifting your last name to your middle name, and taking on your husband's last name. Or even just adding on the husband's last name so that now the woman had 4 names. Except that the actual last name... was still her husband's last name.
And these variations were far from the norm. In a 2009 study of government data, only 6% of women who married did something "unconventional", which included keeping their own name, hyphenating, and tacking on his last name at the end. 94% of women who married got rid of their own last name, and took their husband's last name.
Big deal, you say. She still has her first name.
And that's precisely what a friend told me the other day. A male friend. A male friend who married, and kept his own last name.
And that's when I realized that Shakespeare's Romeo didn't get it, and generally speaking, many men don't get it.
Your name is your identity. Men might mentally divide their lives into 'before I got married' and 'after I got married'. And of course women make this same division. But for women - or at least women who change their names... they also think of themselves as "when I was {maiden name}", and "when I was {married name}". When we meet someone we knew long ago, we don't say "oh, you knew me when I was known as {maiden name}"... rather, we say "oh, you knew me when I was {maiden name}."
Your name isn't just what others call you, your name is your identity. Not your first name, but your entire name. Change that name, and you change your identity.
Romeo was right that a rose would smell as sweet if we called it something different. But my name - my full name - is who I am. And of course I'd be drinking typhoo tea, no matter what they called it.
