While I’m not going to be able to get everything exactly right—some languages contain sounds other languages don’t, and I’m just not able to make those sounds—it’s important to me that when I say someone’s name, I’m saying it correctly. It’s their identity; there’s no excuse for my not trying, or deliberately changing it to something that’s easier for me to pronounce.
It took me almost two years to be able to tell the difference between the times I was pronouncing “Graham” (my husband’s name) correctly and when I wasn’t, because I just couldn’t tell the difference between the A sounds (hint: it doesn’t sound the same as “Sam”). It’s only recently I can tell when someone else has said it incorrectly. But whenever I’d say it wrong and he’d make that little flinch that said so, I felt awful.
Names are important.
My brother’s name is Graham, and my mom was always very adamant that it be pronounced as two syllables—“gray-am” or “gray-um,” not “gram”—to the point that she would correct people—strangers, even!—multiple times until they got it right.
Fast forward to the day I meet my brother’s fiancée. We’re sitting in a restaurant waiting for our food, and my soon-to-be-sister-in-law starts relating a long, drawn-out story about someone I’m not familiar with, and I’m thinking, Great, my brother is marrying one of those deadly boring, self-involved people and then after, like, three minutes of this story and me pretending to laugh and be interested in the foibles of this friend of hers I’ve never met, it hits me: she is talking about my brother, but I didn’t realize it, because she was pronouncing his name wrong.
I had so little experience with people calling my brother “gram” that I didn’t even realize she was talking about him when she said it. And he just sat there and let her! That’s when I knew he was really in love. The end.
