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Comment by drivers99 | Hacker News Reader

I remember the book saying something like "a person's name is the most beautiful sound in the world to them." The book may say to say their name back to them (I don't remember right now), but that's not what I took away from it. It reminded me of when people would make fun of my name (first and/or last) or bring up someone famous who has the same first ("Donald Duck") or last name ("are you related Joan Rivers?"), or someone famous who sounds like my first and last name put together (Doc Rivers), and I never thought it was funny. When I see people make fun of other people's names, the recipient never seemed to enjoy it either.

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You’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.

Michael... Bolton?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhxRAsnizbk

This is 100% what I was thinking of, I considered using that name in my comment actually!!

They might like to hear "Michael Jackson? Like the guy who wrote the book about scotch??" once in a while

I 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.

This 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.

> you have to say "ha ha, very droll sir"

I completely support the defensive adoption of a sardonic butler-persona for everybody on the other side of a cash-register. :p

Like the Michael Bolton character in Office Space.

"Well, you could go by Mike instead of Michael."

"Why should I have to change? He's the one who sucks!"

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.

I'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.

Yosh would always be an abbreviation in Japanese. And only done for foreigners, not for other Japanese.

Yoshihiro or Yoshiyuki would likely be called Yoshi by their friends.

> "I remember the book saying something like "a person's name is the most beautiful sound in the world to them.""

Nobody made fun of my name particularly, it's not like anyone famous, I just don't like it very much. I don't call myself by my name in my head, or on the internet. For most of my life my friends and coworkers had nicknames for me and I prefered that. I associate my name with official paperwork, formal situations, negative situations, aquaintances, and salespeople.

Perhaps because of this I have a bit of fixation on names (people, places, and products) and judging them to sound good or bad. Some names sound great or fine and it's no surprise to me if 'Robert' likes his name and likes hearing it. But I struggle to imagine that people called 'Helpless' or 'Abuse-not'[1] thinking those are the most beautiful sound in the world.

[1] https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/09/puritan-names-lists...

Yeah, you also have to remember that someone has heard every possible joke about their name and their appearance a million times.

I 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.

But, 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.

Saying someone's name back to them is also a memory trick to help yourself remember their name for next time.

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.

Doc Rivers is an awesome name though.

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