What's in a name

[cosmolinguist]

The cognitive dissonance of hearing him called a different name mostly wore off pretty quickly. Christopher's a nice name, and of course I know plenty of Chrises.

This wasn't even the first time I was visiting the parents of someone dear to me who call their son by a different name than the one I'm used to (which was funny to me because these parents already reminded me a bit of those parents even before this).

The only thing that really threw me was hearing our names paired together, as they occasionally were when his parents were talking to each other. It's just been a while since I heard anybody say "Holly and Chris" in an ordinary sentence. These days it's only my parents who I expect to say that, and always carefully. It's never just about making us toast for breakfast, or whatever other things I heard this weekend.

It was, eventually, kind of a nice thing to hear. Better to have nice associations with collections of noises than bad ones. Still, it never stopped being weird to me, and I'm kind of glad it doesn't happen that often (though I suppose if it did I might not think it weird any more...but there's enough different-people-with-the-same-name in my life already anyway, so for that reason if no other I'm glad he prefers James).

Comments

[magister]

D'you know, that just never occurred to me... Sorry. That must have been really weird. *hugs* I'm glad it was still a good weekend.

[cosmolinguist]

Of course it didn't, there's no reason it should (I considered mentioning it in a "here's a funny story" kind of way, but I wasn't sure it was amusing-funny enough to make up for how odd-funny it might seem and I didn't want to make you feel weird). Nothing to be sorry for; it's certainly not your fault what you were named. :) And it's hardly your parents' fault for using that name. No one's done anything wrong. And yes I had a lovely weekend.