Name Games

Sometimes you meet people, and when they tell you their name, you instinctively think, “That must have been a tough name to have in middle school.”

I knew a woman whose last name was Stump, and even though she is a successful and high-powered executive, she still suffers what you might call name trauma. “Seventh grade was extremely difficult for me,” she told me. “I was a little overweight and well under 5 feet tall, so I looked a little like a—”

“A mailbox?” I interjected helpfully. “A tree stump,” she said.

“Oh, right,” I said. “Your name is Stump; you look like a stump. I see it now.“

It’s probably clear at this point that our friendship didn’t blossom. I think I may have been a little too insensitive about her miserable time at Mt. Diablo View Middle School. And that’s unfortunate because while I was not cursed with a last name like Stump, I had a taste of name shame myself.

An elongated rectangular or oval shape is called an oblong. If you were a certain sixth grader I could mention, it seemed hilarious to you that the name of that shape and my name were so similar. “Well, if it isn’t the oblong Rob Long,” this budding stand-up comedian would say on a daily basis, utterly unaware of the first rule of comedy: change up the material.

“Hey, it’s the oblong Rob Long,” is the kind of teasing that isn’t mean, really. We’re all oblong in shape. We all have legs longer than our shoulders are wide (except, I guess, for my friend named Stump). So it’s not like I could have taken serious offense. I just had to wait it out, like so many other awkward discomforts of sixth and seventh grade. Eventually, the caravan moved on to someone else with a juicy target of a name (probably someone named Dick, I’d guess).

Names are a tricky business. One of Johnny Cash’s biggest hits, “A Boy Named Sue,” seems quaintly anachronistic today when there are plenty of boys named Sue running around, some on the girls lacrosse team and some reading children’s stories at the local public library. But in the song, which was written by children’s author Shel Silverstein and recorded by Cash in 1969, the father explains to his angry son that he gave him the name Sue because he knew it would make him tough and resilient. A boy named Sue, went the logic, would face a lot of abuse and would therefore have to learn to fight and stand up for himself.

That was, as I said, in 1969. Times change. In 2023, all a boy named Sue needs is a big-time product endorsement deal. A boy named Sue isn’t going to suffer any name trauma. A boy named Sue is going to be rich.

But that’s a very specific case. For most of us — we Stumps, we Oblongs — a little name-based teasing was the price of admission into the eighth grade. There was a boy named Pitts in my class at one point, and I’m sure he could sing a few bars of the song. I have no idea where he is now. I hope he’s rich and powerful enough to terrify anyone who dares to reprise the “You’re the Pitts!” shouts from grammar school. But as I recall, he didn’t have it as bad as the child whose last name was Tampone, which was just way, way too close to “tampon” for any 13-year-old boy to overlook.

Children are cruel; we know that. I can’t think of one adult friend of mine who doesn’t have some story about being teased for something, and making fun of someone’s name is about as elementary as it gets. The current front-runner for the Republican nomination for president of the United States has made making fun of his opponents’ names a signature political move. Imagine what he would do if running against a Gov. Pitts or a Sen. Tampone.

I like to think I’m better than that, but I’m really not. When my lunch with Ms. Stump was over, we said our goodbyes outside the restaurant and went our separate ways. It was a rainy winter day, and she was wearing a bright red coat that, on her 5-foot plump frame, didn’t make her look like a mailbox or a tree stump at all.

She looked like a fire hydrant. And I laughed when I thought of it and hoped she hadn’t heard me.