Recent studies have confirmed what scientists have long suspected — the average person is not actually “bad with names,” as they so often tell you, but are in fact only bad at remembering your name, specifically.
“There seems to be something about your name in particular, whatever it is, that proves difficult for the average person to find in any way memorable or valuable long enough to store in their long-term memory,” lead scientist Maria Kempler announced this week while releasing her team’s latest findings.
“Generally, people find it easiest to tell you they’re just bad with names,” she continued, “to spare your feelings. It’s easier if you think of them as generally scattered and careless — maybe even a bit thoughtless or self-absorbed — than to hear the truth, which is that your name, specifically, whatever it is that you call yourself (I can’t exactly recall) is the least memorable thing they have ever heard.”
“Again, I can’t stress this enough,” she said, “other people have absolutely no trouble recalling the names of new acquaintances, coworkers, employees at the post office, cab drivers, and friend’s girlfriends. It’s your name that’s the problem. They’ve been telling you it’s a general problem, but that’s not true at all.”
The latest research confirms that absolutely nothing helps other people remember what you’re called; not repeating your name while making eye contact, not writing it down (they don’t write it down, of course, but even if they did, it wouldn’t help), not asking how it’s spelled, not even asking a mutual friend to remind them of it later.
If prompted, your mutual friend would have to admit he had also forgotten your name months before, and generally stuck with calling you “Hey” and “Do you have a second?”
People don’t focus on you, but even if they did, research suggests this wouldn’t help them remember who you are.
Scientists did have a few suggestions that might help you leave more of an impression when meeting new people, but they forgot about your very existence within the last few minutes; you faded so swiftly from the transom of their minds that they couldn’t remember you even had a name to forget.
I knew it.
Haha very funny post Marjorie.
I’m pretty good with names, but terrible at facial recognition, and I always have that fear of wondering whether I should be saying hi to that person I pass on the street, in the store, etc. So I often say “I’m bad with faces” if I am reintroduced to someone I should’ve remembered, but that probably just creeps people out more.
I’m bad with faces and names! To the point that I think I might be mildly face-blind. It gets worse if I feel put on the spot to remember someone’s name (introducing acquaintances, seeing someone I’ve met multiple times). I’ve actually bonded with new acquaintances over this. Except then I forget their name and/or face, so it’s a very short-lived bond.
(However, I’m really good at recognizing people, even acquaintances or at a great distance, from non-facial clues. I don’t know if this is something I’ve developed to compensate for my face-blindness or proof that I’m not actually face-blind.)
Totally something to compensate, I’m sure! I took a face-blindness test over the internet (so, you know, really scientific) where you’re shown celebrities’ faces without hair, and according to that, I’m very mildly face-blind myself (eta: they also ask if you know who each celeb is). I think I’ve gotten really good at compensating for it socially (it helps that I don’t meet tons of new people!), but TV/movies can be so hard. Mystery-type things are the best/worst–best for unintentional hilarity once I proudly make the connection that a character was in disguise, worst for missing important plot points.
Ugh yes! I am constantly going “who’s that person” – both as in what do I know them from, and were they in a previous scene and I already forgot them?
Two of my worst offenses: could not tell Logan and Duncan apart for the entire first season of VM; could not tell ANYONE who was male and of the same race apart for the first 2 seasons of The Wire. Makes everything very confusing.
is it a worse offense that I haven’t seen either of those? haha. Men are the hardest for me too! My hypothesis is that there is less variation in hair, clothing, etc. My most recent offense (last night): I’m finally watching Dollhouse, and in the third episode I momentarily thought that the villain du jour was Topher (and that the slight hair color discrepancy could be put down to the lighting).Battlestar Galactica was great, since *everyone* had to look for clues in attempts to identify individual members of particular Cylon models.
Oh, well I haven’t seen either of *those* so we’re even! I definitely agree with your male hypothesis. It’s the same for me in real life, too (except for when women drastically change their hair, then I’m screwed). There are a lot fewer cues to depend on.
I think I agree with the men thing. I worked at a drug store and had the hardest time stocking the men’s hair dye (there are only six options! It should be that hard!) but I realized that for the women’s dye, I relied on the different hairstyles of the women to put them in the right place, while the men were mostly similar looking middle aged white dudes with different variations of sand-colored hair. Taken one at a time, the men looked different enough, but I organized them by the dye number. I also noticed that I recognized regular customers fairly quickly by their keys (we had a loyalty key fob that we scanned) than their faces, which sank in more slowly for me. I can also identify people by their gait pretty well. Some people’s faces are easily recognizable, but most people’s just don’t stick in my mind.
It would be a few years after the drug store job that I would read about face blindness, but it kind of clicked.
I’m totally with you on the gait thing–I could identify people walking down the hall in college just hearing their footsteps. That was a fun “party” trick (i.e., it impressed my best friend). I don’t know what makes some people’s faces harder for me than others, but it’s definitely a contextual thing. I don’t even know how many times I’ve waved back at someone, figuring that I knew them…and then realized that no, I actually didn’t. sigh.
I have a great story about this – my husband and I went to see the True Grit remake in theaters when it came out. We always stick around for the acting potion of the credits, and upon reading them I exclaimed “Oh! I didn’t know Matt Damon was in this movie!”
He was the highest-billed actor in it who wasn’t Jeff Bridges or Hailee Steinfeld. He was one of the three main characters and had a ton of screen time.But it turns out that when you put a moustache on Matt Damon, I have absolutely no clue who he is. My husband makes fun of me for it to this day.
!! samesies.
Last night, we watched Captain America: The Winter Soldier. When the credits came on, I went “Robert Redford was in this?!” and my boyfriend replied “He was the *main* bad guy.”
welp!
Oooh, thank you for alerting me to that that existed! I’m feeling really smug about my facial recognition skills right now.
You’re welcome, lucky duck! Next up, color IQ test via apartment therapy, another test that made me feel inadequate but also somehow validated. (Yes, I’m also not good at color, apparently.) (this came up pretty quickly under a search for “smug animal.”
I’m also bad with both. It can lead to awkward situations, especially at work, when someone gets upset that I didn’t say “hi” to them in the hallway, and I’m like “but you’re wearing a different shirt today, how am I supposed to recognize you?”
I do this also! This leads to a lot of awkward staring, as I try to work out whether I know a person and how (did we take a class together? hang out at a party? you take this bus often?), or else awkward hiding if I don’t wish to confront the problem.
I don’t have to confront the problem often, but here is an awkward example: I see a cute guy on the subway and while I am looking at him, he looks back. I look away, embarrassed. Then, feeling bold, I look again. He is still looking. I am in a panic: is this happening? are we flirting on the subway? He gets up and stands by the door, which is closer to me, and then he squints at me and says “. . . Sara?”
Because, as it turns out, we’d met a month prior. Actually we’d met more than once on various occasions, but a month prior it had been at a party and we had chatted at length, and although we hadn’t seen each other since, we’d exchanged emails. Like, this dude was known to me. But I didn’t recognize him.
*fails*
*flails*
So now I just read books and ignore everyone.
Your last 3 lines encapsulate me perfectly.
Oh, yes, I do the awkward staring, too! This morning, one of my close friends was unexpectedly at my transit stop (she doesn’t have a morning commute and was wearing sports clothes). From across the street, I thought it was her. Then I got within 20 feet of her and could see her face–and thought it wasn’t her. When I got to the stop, I kept kind of craning my neck to try to see her face and finally just walked up right next to her, at which point I confirmed it was her. I’m pretty sure everyone else at the stop thought I was a complete weirdo until she and I started talking.
The first couple years in my current city, I kept walking up to people I didn’t know at parties to say in a sunny and friendly manner Hi, I’m Vorsoisson, I don’t think we’ve met, only to have them respond by asking how my job at Company X is going, whether I’m still taking X class, and if I’ve found a new apartment yet. I now assume that I’ve met EVERYONE at my friends’ parties and approach them with absolute confidence that I know them and let THEM feel awkward and confused if they can’t remember me. Hey, how are things going? I ask, and watch as their brows furrow and their responses become more vague and trailing as they try to figure out where they know me from. It is deeply satisfying.
I like your name! (Though, if I’m guessing correctly, not the character you named yourself after. The books are marvellous though!)
Thank you! I get that Ekaterin’s not everyone’s cup of tea; she’s a little different than most of the women of the Vorkosigan series. I’m fond of her, though. And she supplies a username that is conveniently *always* available, no matter how large the social media site, so that is very convenient.
I used to work at Starbucks, and I saw hundreds of people during most of my shifts. I now assume, if I know somebody but don’t know why, that they were a semi-regular at my store.
My actual former regulars, of course, I often don’t greet, because I remember their names and drinks, and that would probably weird them out.
Ahahahaha, in my early 20s I was pretty bad at recognizing people, then I got new contact lenses and suddenly got much better. It’s telling that the people I socialized with the most on the spur of the moment were the friends with very distinctive features or habits: an asymmetrical bright-magenta haircut, a big bundle of strawberry-blonde hair and a closet full of green sweaters and coats, a long ponytail and beard and a collection of loud silk shirts, the rail-thin six-foot-tall friend with the fierce and frequent cackle.
They were the people I got closest to in part because (I later realized) they were the people I was most likely to ID and greet from a distance, sometimes probably snubbing other, less distinctively clad (and therefore less identifiable) friends nearby on the streets of our small city.
Nicely written, Melanie.
jesus there are going to be like fifty of these jokes in the comments aren’t there
There’s only two so far but I guess I could add one if that’s not enough for you.
Most people aren’t bad with jokes, Valerie, just your commenters.
What jokes, Mafferty?
The best part about being married is I can be like “oooh have you met my husband?” and then he gets their name and I look fine.
Great in case you forget your husband’s name, too!
I have used this strategy. It is so helpful. I also try to bring a friend along to places/events in the event Mr. Wren can’t go.
Okay, so, this story makes me look pretty bad, which is to say it is bluntly factual:
There is one friend-of-a-friend whose name I just cannot hammer into my head.
Actually, it’s worse than that. The first, say, half-dozen times I met her, I introduced myself to her anew* as if we had never met, because as far as I could remember, we had not. She got pretty snippy with me the Xth time (I’m not going to pretend I know how many times she politely tolerated this because HEY I don’t. at all), so I made an effort to cement her a little better in my memory. Now I know her face.
But I still can’t get her name right. Let’s say she’s a Kristen and I keep calling her “Kirsten.” (That’s not remotely close to her name, but I’m not going to ID her here.) EVERY TIME. I say “Hello, Kirsten, it’s great to see you!” and she hisses “It’s Kristen,” then stares balefully at me in silence.
I have tried everything. I’ve written it down, I’ve looked her up on Facebook to see it in print, I’ve repeated it to myself after she corrects me, I’ve asked our mutual friend for a refresher before I’m likely to bump into Kristen/Kirsten at parties. I’ve also apologized sincerely every time, but it does nothing to salve her annoyance that has bloomed into rage.
And of course I’ve told her “I’m so sorry, I can’t imagine why I’m so terrible with names! I really do make an effort. It’s not you! It’s my stupid memory, there’s something missing in it.”
That is a lie. I’m good with names. I spent years in high-end retail, where I got so good with names that I actually had to curb my habit of calling returning customers by name because my long-term, single-acquaintance recall was freaking out a few of them. That skill has softened somewhat with passing time and lack of use, but I’m still good at remembering names if I give even the tiniest damn.
I have no trouble remembering names.
It’s just her. It’s just her name.
That felt pretty good to get off my chest.
*I almost always re-introduce myself to acquaintances and friends-of-friends with “Hi, I’m Emily, I’m sure we’ve met” before either adding “It’s [name], right?” or letting them tell me their name. That little pretense restores the social balance if they’ve forgotten me or my name. But not with this one woman. Apparently I have walked up to her at least a half-dozen times, stuck out my hand, and said “Hi, I’m Emily, nice to meet you!”
Oh god, what if she reads this
she’ll know
she’ll finally know
(somewhere else on the internet kirsten/kristen is complaining about this person who never gets her name right and at this point it must be deliberate, right?)
[shrugs] what’re ya gonna do, right?
Okay, really: if she reads this, she’ll unearth the OH NO TERRIBLE SECRET that it’s not a blanket stupidity over names on my part but a highly specific stupidity about her name (which, Nb, is not remotely close to Kristen or Kirsten). I’m okay with that.
Honestly, she’s been pretty nasty to me about this, which is understandable but hasn’t made it any easier to actually remember her name. She could, for example, use my habit WHICH SHE HAS SEEN ME DO A ZILLION TIMES APPARENTLY THOUGH I DON’T REMEMBER THEM ALL where I make it easier for other people and avoid social tension by reminding them what my fucking name is even though we’ve been introduced previously.
But she doesn’t; she appears to wring some satisfaction from watching me predictably call her the wrong name. So that’s probably going to keep happening. I’ve done everything I can and failed, and she ain’t helping me.
I had this same situation once, and I did remember the person’s name better after they were nasty to me about it, so it’s not like her strategy never works.
Your strategy does sound nicer and more reliable, though.
Yeah, and I want to be clear that I don’t blame her at all for disliking me or feeling slighted. Just because I’m not intentionally being rude—just because I’m actually trying to do better—doesn’t excuse me from the social burden in which I’m failing.
I am big fan of the “Let it be awkward” school of setting boundaries, and of course she’s completely entitled to let the burden of my failure rest on my shoulders. She has no obligation to help me out, even if it would make our meetings less awkward for everyone. (She does arguably have a social burden to resist making it more awkward through visible hostility, but for all I know, she’s doing her very best, too.)
But other than owning my failure, smoothing it over as best I can with the lie that it’s not just her, and making every effort to get it through my head for next time, there’s not much I can do.
Oh, yes. My person whose name I repeatedly screwed up continued to dislike me for as long as I knew them, and I don’t blame them for that at all.
But yeah, if you’re trying as best you can, then I don’t think there’s much you can do.
I have to say, at this point I might start deliberately getting it dramatically wrong.
Oh no, slightly. Every time, just slightly off.
I’m already doing that part, TwiceBitten.
Well yes, obviously the “call her Emily” plan is far superior.
Oh! My name is slightly off!
I am… not great at social cues.
And I prefer when people get my name wrong, because when people say my name in every sentence I think they might be witches trying to control me, and if they’re wrong, I feel much more comfortable.
I can never explain this to anyone who is apologizing for calling me by the wrong name.
I have never yet snapped out “Enough already, Dale Carnegie” at someone who used my name in every sentence, but that’s only because I [have iron self-control/am a big chicken].
Well, now the next time someone does this to me, I know what I’ll say.
Under my breath.
Well, really inside my head.
I had a minor, but upsetting, argument with a friend the other day. When I saw her briefly yesterday, she said, “hi, unreadaethel. How are you doing, unreadaethel? I’m fine, thanks, unreadaethel,” and it freaked me out so much. This is probably not a sign that she’s a witch, but I have no idea what it’s a sign of.
“The Tick vs Thrackazog”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjKgwaT-x5U
The Unnamed Nemesis!
I think you should pull a Lord John Marbury and just make up a name for her that you stick with. Who cares what she’s called; her name is Gerald now.
this is why I just don’t call people by their name
I know it’s a fairly awful show, but there is this great scene on Everybody Loves Raymond where Ray answers the phone and it’s for his mother-in-law, so he has to hand it to her. And then he slowly pokes her in the arm with the antenna and says “you” and it just kills me, because YES.
Your “Hi, I’m Emily” reminded me of a funny thing that happened to my mom once.
We were at my aunt’s, and her friend Bob was coming over later for dinner. His name was coming up in conversation several times, as could be expected, and just generally we had the name Bob in our minds. So when he came and rang the doorbell, my mom answered the door and said “Hi, I’m Bob!” Bob looked at her and immediately said “I thought I was Bob.”
OH MY GOD
I SHOULD JUST START CALLING HER “EMILY”
A THOUSAND TIMES YES.
Now I’m imagining a person who addresses everyone they meet by their own name. The people I want to see do this, in no particular order, are:
1) You, seems like it might be a good idea
2) Mallory
3) Kanye West
4) Joe Biden
5) Beyonce
6) Meryl Streep
7) Everyone named Kevin
I hate phone calls and have to psych myself up by rehearsing my lines, and I can’t even count how many times the obsessive rehearsal, plus the stress of someone actually picking up the phone, has led me to say, “Hi, this is [PERSON I’M TRYING TO CALL], is [MY OWN NAME] available?”
Oh God also this is only tangentially related, but: once, when I was about six, my mom left me unattended in the car while she ran back inside to get something. I decided I would crouch down in the backseat, then jump up and yell “BOO!” when she came back. Then I started narrating in my head what I was doing, like, “As she crouched down in the back seat of the…” and at that moment my mom opened the door and I jumped up and yelled “CAR!” and I still think of it sometimes at 3 in the morning.
This is an amazing story and I’m so glad you shared it.
oh, I did this the first time I met my brother’s ex-girlfriend. They’d been dating a while, I definitely knew her name, but we’d never been in the same state before. So I said “Hi, I’m Stephanie!” rather than “Hi, Stephanie!” whoops.
I do this with driving directions. If i got your house wrong the first time, I will get it wrong the next 10 times and mix my memory of what route I was supposed to take, what I actually took, will mix together and I have to have my GPS open. It’s only happened with a couple people I know.
And yet, I’ve driven 300-400k miles and can tell you what lanes you want to be in and how long it will take people to get to their destination, and list 4 or 5 alternate routes depending on time of day or traffic patterns.
“Don’t go to the wrong place. Remember, don’t go to [wrong address]. Only go to [right address]. [Wrong address] is not the destination.”
or when in a country with opposite driving lanes. “look left, right then left again” becomes “Look right look right look right” “YOU ALWAYS DO IT WRONG LOOK THE OPPOSITE OF YOUR INSTINCT” (even when instinct becomes to look right). Eventually you just end up with your head on a swivel.
Poor, sensitive Kirsten/Kristen. I had a college roommate named Kirsten who was of the Know-It-All clan and whenever it got to be too much, and I wanted to set her hair on fire, I’d call her Kristen. SO effective.
I work in an industry that like 95% older white males and I cannot tell you all apart and I’m not even sorry. Eight out of ten names are generic white-dude names Michael/John/James/Patrick/Brian/Kevin/Tom/whatever. And if I deal with twenty-six people a day, twenty-five of whom have one of those names, no, I cannot place you by listening to your voice on the phone or “Hey, it’s Mike!” MIKE WHO. I have literally hundreds of Michaels/Mikes in my database.
If no one ever calls me again and I ask “Who is this, please?” and they say “Ha ha, you don’t know my voice?” it will be too soon.
this post has been brought to you by A Bad Day At Work
See also voicemail messages that begin “Hi, it’s me.” NOPE. Unless you are my mother or my husband (and not always even then), you are not “me,” you are A NAME SAY YOUR NAME.
We have so many Davids in my office. My work bff believes there’s one in every department. Every time I get an email from a David, I have to look them up in the directory.
“Ha ha, you don’t know my voice?”
“YOU HAVE BEEN CODDLED FOR TOO LONG.”
(my immediate instinct was to respond “oh it’s so noisy in here, I can’t really….” or “Of course! How are you?”)
OH GOD ME TOO. And for me, most of them are elected officials which means that they get switched out for other generic old white dudes every so often. It’s making me hate the democratic process. Municipalities should just pick one old white dude and stick with him for decades.*
*One of the villages in my jurisdiction actually has done this. I call him Mayor-for-Life. But I actually for reals know his name.
Ugh! I work for a local government and EVERYONE IS THE SAME. I keep all of the nearby municipalities’ websites on my phone so I can discretely check out their photos. Thank god for those ‘know your officials’ websites. And then at events where a ton of elected officials get together?! Nope.
The worst is that everyone knows me, because I’m the only younger woman around. I fail at names. Often.
I knew so many Matts in college that we started giving them oddly specific nicknames and/or called them by their last names or both. Same with Dans.
One of the Matts had no distinct character traits that we just combined his first and middle names into a nickname.
Ah that is so true! I worked with a bunch of older, mostly white men and women, and while I had all the women’s names down just fine I was hopeless with the men. Oh well, if for once in their lives they are subjected to “well you all look the same to me” it’s probably for the better.
I intended to write something about how all the middle aged men never can remember your name OR your face if you’re a woman, but it seems to go both ways (I work with a lot of older men as well). There is one man who can’t remember ANYONE (and who doesn’t really seem to notice gender or age, being more interested in excavators and other heavy machinery, bless him) but he learned to remember both my face and my name early on. He was so proud of that and called me by name a bit more often than was necessary. He called me “Caroline”, though, which isn’t my name at all.
awww I betcha he is a lovely dad though.
But… I really am bad at names. I promise! It isn’t you!
(True Story: I am so paranoid about my inability with names that when I was first getting together with my husband I called him ‘sweetie’ until I heard someone else call him by name. I’d been right, all along. It was three weeks of ‘sweetie’. In my defense, he’d introduced himself to me as his nickname, but his legal name was something else.)
I first met my bf in a bar, and couldn’t be sure I had heard him say his name correctly over the music. But then it got to be too long to ask to confirm, so I just had to politely wait for an opportunity to see his name written or hear someone else say it. (I finally got a glimpse at his ID once.) So to friends I referred to him as “90% X” for a while, as in that was my certainty percentage of his name.
Perfect.
I met my partner in a bar, and there were some drunk make-outs, and I’m fairly at peace with the fact that I won’t remember names after a first meeting. But I did do the trick of handing him my cell phone to enter his number. So I could wake up the next morning and look for the new number.
Also of note: many friends, making his acquaintance over the courtship, were curious why I used the long, legal version of his name and not the nickname version he seemed equally comfortable with. Some of them got the honest reason: the long version was what was put in my phone that night.
See, that was the unfair thing – he had done this to me so he had my full name and I had a vague memory.
I referred to my high school crush as NSOC, which stands for “Not Sean O’Connor” after one of my friends tried to ID him by description and guessed wrong about who he was. I still don’t know his name. The first guy I ever slept with had a Polish nickname that was incomprehensible to me and a similarly difficult-for-me name, so when people ask me the name of my first I have to say I don’t know. I knew him, but… name?
aaah I can’t believe it took three weeks for you to hear it! I had the opposite problem–my girlfriend’s friends used her name about 10000 times in a week, but each of them had their own pronunciation for it. I bit the bullet at the end of the week and sheepishly asked what her preferred pronunciation was. She wasn’t picky (see: not correcting friends), but I figured that I’d up the relationship’s chance of survival by knowing which one she’d pick in an ideal world. So far, so good, haha.
we spent most of that three weeks in his bedroom so there wasn’t really much of a chance to find out for certain, you know?
I was… 80% on what he’d introduced himself as, but there was that chance it could be a similar-sounding but different name, and by that point it was a little late to ask.
Fair enough! She had her name on her door/on the class roster (college, woooo!), so it was kind of hard *not* to meet friends, etc. (eta: definitely harder to learn these things without those helpful hints. :D)
“employees at the post office, cab drivers”
I can’t forget names I’ve never been given.
I can usually remember unique names, but if your name is pretty common like John or Zach or Chris? Fugetaboutit!
My offline name was not too terribly common for a long time, but I’m hearing more and more kids with my name and I gotta be honest with you it sort of pisses me off. I like having an unusual name.
I have the opposite! All the other people with my name are dying, ahahaha, there is an advantage to being 40 years younger than everyone else with my name!
I mean, it’s sad. Sad. Sad that they’re dying. And in five years everyone will be naming babies Bittern after their Gamgam.
This report doesn’t mention the part where you hate introducing yourself because you can never find a time to casually slip “oh btw I’m _____” into conversation that’s NOT painfully awkward. People never even knowing your name in the first place has got to be a major contributing factor in the memory problem, though.
I kinda operate on the assumption that most people are as awkward as we are all admitting to being, so they might be grateful when someone bluntly says “Oh, hey, I never introduced myself, I’m [name]” or “I know we’ve met, but I’m sorry, your name went right out of my head, I’m [name].”
Maybe I’m wrong about that, but the assumption does help me gulp and just say the thing. Sometimes just saying the awkward thing is the least awkward way out of the situation.
I’ve found that lampshading the awkward moment helps. “Ha, we’ve known each other for [length of time], but I don’t actually know your name! Isn’t that awkward and potentially embarrassing? Lots of people sure would feel weird about this moment. Let’s embrace and bask in the awkwardness, friend.”
And then you either have an awesome acquaintance whose name you’ll never forget, or you don’t have to worry about a name, because this person will never talk to you again.
And that is why I am now know as “daughter’s name’s mom”. Either daughter will do, I answer to both.
I have a special-needs young relative who cannot learn, even though a teen now, that others have perspectives different from her own. She introduces me to all her neighbors and to every stranger as Aunt Rose. I jump in and say “Just call me Rose” every time. Some of her neighbors have called me Aunt Rose for years now, though they’re older than I am. I think they just enjoy how odd it sounds. And we all love this child, so there’s that.
Honestly, I’m 30, and have no special needs, and I have a hard time referring to relatives without mentioning their relationship title. It’s a “calling grownups by their names” thing.
There are plenty of people at my church whose names I still don’t know, even after years. I know them only as the parents of their children, and it’s awkward to ask now.
Appropriate Octopus Pie:
http://www.octopuspie.com/2012-01-11/502-have-you…
I’m bad with names, just call everyone ‘Captain’ or ‘Chip’ or ‘Bingo’
I’ve always liked ‘chief’
I definitely reintroduced myself to my now-boyfriend within 5 minutes of meeting him for the first time, thinking he was a different person than the person I’d just been introduced to. (He was sitting down the first time and standing up the second time so… that’s my defense? Also he doesn’t remember this happening, so I think I get a pass.)
I also tend to link two people in my head for no reason and then confuse them for the rest of my life. For example, Sigourney Weaver and Susan Sarandon. If you show me a picture of one of them and ask me which one it is I cannot tell you. Which one is in Ghostbusters? Which one is in Dead Man Walking? Was it the same one? I DO NOT KNOW.
My dad insists that he and my mom met a few months before the time that they met and started dating. My mom has no recollection of it. Who is right? We’ll never know!
My parents and I once ran into my roommate and her boyfriend on a hike. My dad has met both of them multiple times and had seen my roommate the week before (though in his defense, she was sick and not really chatty). Roommate and my mom and I chatted for a bit and then went our separate ways.
Dad: “I know I should probably know this, but who were those people?”
I have that Sigourney/Susan problem, as well as a Reese Witherspoon/Renee Zellweger problem. I mean, I know which is which but 90% of the time I cannot remember Renee’s name and just think of her as Not-Reese.
This somewhat undermines my claim up-thread to being good with names, but:
I have a whole collection of old-timey actors that my brain lumps in together—which would probably never come up if I weren’t a film/television critic who also is married to a film/television critic. Just yesterday, my husband walked in and said (of the guest murderer on the Columbo I was watching) “Hey, it’s Richard Kiley!,” which made me blink really hard before I managed to (not for the first time) untangle Richard Kiley, Richard Kiel, and Howard Keel in my mental directory. Those are three very different dudes.
“the guest murderer on the Columbo I was watching.” You are, simply, the best.
Oh my! I once saw Susan Sarandon on the street in NYC. She is tiny! Cameras are often aimed at her from below her eye level to disguise her lack of stature. And Sigourney Weaver is one of the tallest women I have ever seen. Is it just the names that get tangled in your brain?
For some reason they are just The Same Person in my head. I think it’s the red hair? I honestly have no idea, but when I try to think of either of them, my brain returns a terrible Photoshop mashup mental image of the two of them.
It’s a totally understandable problem. http://getsuthinking.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/…
I’m good with names but terrible with faces so it’s totally wasted. Sure, I’ve met a Rudolph Yaber. Couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. What good is that?
At a former job there was a very kind women who was convinced my name was Jennifer. Every morning “Hi Jennifer!” Our email addresses included our first names, though, so she would have to type in a name that isn’t Jennifer, then start the email with “Hi Jennifer!” The office had never had a Jennifer in the time she’d worked there! Puzzling.
Names I get called by the inattentive or forgetful. Let me be clear that this list doesn’t include people who know my family and are mistakenly calling me by a sister’s name, nor does it include people who call me by some variant of Elsa, which is my habitual screen name.
– Ellen <- far-and-away the leader. If someone gets my name wrong, they are almost always going to call me Ellen.
– Elaine
– Ellie
– Stephanie (because of my last name, I’m sure)
– Jennifer (which has nothing to do with my first, middle, or last name)
– Kimberly
and my personal favorite:
– Emberley
My dad has seven brothers and they all look exactly like him, and it’s hell on my girlfriend to remember their names. They’re always ribbing her and telling her there will be a pop quiz of everyone’s names at the end of whatever family event we’re at, and even though she knows it’s a joke she always looks a little stricken. I also have four Aunt Dianes between my mom and dad, so whenever she doesn’t remember one of my aunts’ names, she just guesses Diane. I have twenty aunts total so the odds aren’t terrible.
O: 20 aunts!! how many first cousins?
ETA: I feel like that face looks negative but I really just wanted to convey shock not dismay.
I think 67 at this point? Somewhere between 60 and 70. My dad is from a huge family (17 kids) and my mom is from a decent sized one too (7 kids), but no one has had more than 3 kids of their own iirc.
… but do you know all their names/faces?
Yeah almost all of them live less than a few hours drive from my hometown. Some of my male cousins will trip me up occasionally because their names are so similar though “Hi John/Jason/Josh/other Josh/Joe/Jeff/Jim/James”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djrH9GR9xO0
This is perfect. Listening to my dad name all his siblings in birth order (he is 11/17, the middlest of middle children) is a thing of beauty.
I went to a very Jewish school, and I’m bad with names in general, but I ALWAYS mixed up Elena / Elana / Ilona / etc. SO MANY. And they’re all spelled different. I remember one acquaintance who I knew well-ish, and she would get so mad if people said the wrong one… but I still don’t remember if her name is Elena or Elana.
This is a slight tangent, but I once briefly dated a dude who had face blindness—he mostly identified people by their gaits. This turned out to work in my favor because when we SUPER AWKWARDLY broke up a few weeks later, I knew that if we ever ran into each other again at the coffee shop where we met, he’d have no idea who I was. Convenient!
After a coworker and I giggled at him getting the head of a different department’s name wrong about 5 times, my boss actually told me that if he didn’t actually *supervise* someone, or need their assistance in something, he didn’t care about remembering their name at all. It made me so mad I sassed him and called him by the wrong name for the next 2 days. …Looking back on it, it’s a miracle he didn’t fire me.
“Anne was getting a little chummy. When people get a little too chummy with me I like to call them by the wrong name to let them know I don’t really care about them.”
You’re welcome, Lester
We need to reintroduce the job of nomenclator. Can’t be a slave, though, so unpaid interns, maybe?
Tangentially related, but one of my biggest pet-peeves is when I read an article written by a person of colour who has a culturally-influenced first name that is hard to spell/say for white people and the dicrimination they face due to it, and then underneath that article are 300 billion comments that offer nothing of constructive value, just “OMG this happens to me all the time!!! no one can ever spell my name i have to tell them its KRISTYNN with a k and a y and two nn’s so i totally know what you go through!!”
I’m pretty good at remembering names (at least after someone has told me their name twice), but I’m extremely uncomfortable actually using them. I have to make a conscious effort to use someone’s name when speaking to them, and I have no idea why. Does anyone else have this?
Also, as long as we’re discussing how to (not) remember names, I have to link to Christine Lavin’s musical solution:
Don’t Ever Call Your Sweetheart By His Name (song starts at about 1:15)
In a conversation with another person, I will probably only use a person’s name in the original greeting, unless I am recounting to them a conversation I had about them with someone else. I don’t try to use it more often than that, partly because I really dislike being on the receiving end. I have had many experiences where people knew my name and I didn’t know theirs (being the new kid in a group, being a tour guide) and I dislike that power imbalance. I also have had too much experience with people repeating my name in conversation because they think it will make me more inclined to like them or do something for them (see above re: tour guide) and so too much name use in a conversation makes me disinclined to trust someone.
I have this same habit. It seems to be pretty normal where I live to greet people by saying, “Hey/Hi/Hello, [name]” and then repeat the name when you say farewell, but it’s just never my first instinct to call someone by their name. Ever. So I’m always just saying “Hi!” and “Bye!” and I wonder often if people think that sounds odd, or bare, or like I’ve forgotten their name.
I realized it during high school and it’s just gotten more obvious in the years since. If I’m not talking about someone in the third person for the first time, I never say their name. I don’t know why that is.
Aretha? Hest? Gipple? MULVA?
My name is Caroline and it is almost impossible for people to not pronounce it ‘Carolyn,’ even if I literally just introduced myself. ‘Hi, I’m Caroline.’ ‘Hi, Carolyn!’
And then I feel stupid correcting them because…I just said it? And also because I think it won’t take the second time, either. This is also happens in emails, when they are responding to one I’ve sent, so my actual name is there at least twice.
As a Carolyn perpetually dubbed ‘Caroline’, I am your alternate-universe counterpart.
Mnemonic devices do not help. No amount of ‘Carolyn – rhymes with Marilyn’ will prevent my boss of four years from using the Other name.
Yeah, I’ve tried “‘Line’ is right there in my name!” Doesn’t work. I had a French teacher for four years who FINALLY started pronouncing it correctly and then a Carolyn transferred into our class and shot that all to hell.
When I was in college there was this beautiful boy who everyone thought was sooo dreamy, and he thought a good friend of mine was pretty cute and would always come up and flirt with her at parties and stuff. So, he would come up to us and start talking to her, and then in an attempt to ingratiate himself with her would turn to me and be like “Hi, I’m ___, what’s your name?” I mean this happened like once or twice a month for a few YEARS. To add insult to injury, she and I had the SAME GODDAMN NAME.
I always get called by a name that is very close to my name, but not it. Not my name, but not a bad name so I don’t really care. Its awkward when someone has been calling me that for awhile and I don’t care enough to correct them and then someone who knows my actual name overhears and says, ‘No, her name is [Floridagal]’ and then the first person looks at me like…I don’t know what? I have no idea what to say at this point. My name is a little uncommon. It was more uncommon before a movie came out recently about a character with my same name and everyone started naming their kids the name. And I legit don’t care that they are calling me the wrong one. But now both people are looking at me like, “why are you too timid to correct someone who calls you the wrong name?” And that’s not it. I mean, probably if it was anything else that would be it. But in this case it’s actually that I don’t mind.
TL:DR LOL names
I also can never remember someone’s name upon seeing their face unless they are somehow distinctive or well-known to me. I was deeply into partying (like, electronic music dancing kind of partying) in my 20’s and I there were SO MANY WHITE DUDES WEARING BALL CAPS and I could never keep them straight. Usually I could blame it on “Ha, sorry, I’m always on drugs when I see you,” but one of them would get really offended, but he hated me based on fights on this message board everyone was on. I think he thought I was just pretending to not remember him. But really, techno parties in Toronto in the early aughts was like 70% white guys in ball caps.
You’re my favorite, Mergatroyd.
Just gonna drop this here… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yh-0dFvTyI8
I usually say their name back to them, upon meeting a person. 🙂 Then say it again before going our respective ways, with what I hope is a not-weird smiley stare (for cataloguing, ok).
There’s this awkward moment during a school retreat. The girls’ bathroom was packed for pre-bedtime routines, and I was among those lining the sinks. I definitely remember the girl beside me because we talked once during uni admission exams review. But she only remembered my face and was so embarrassed by that so I had to quickly brush my teeth to avoid being embarrassed by her embarrassment.
Thank you! I get that Ekaterin's not everyone's cup of tea; she's a little different than most of the women of the Vorkosigan series. I'm fond of her, though. And she supplies a username that is conveniently *always* available, no matter how large the social media site, so that is very convenient.
I have the exact opposite problem to this, where I’m constantly freaked out that people know my name when I have absolutely no idea who they are.
I do get called “Irish” all the time and have people making stupid jokes about “hahaha, are you from Ireland or is that your name?” but that’s because I live in a country that linguistically doesn’t distinguish between “s” and “sh” sounds.
I’ve also recently developed memory loss with regard to guys I used to date. “That guy.. Um… I dated him for three months like half a year ago… shit.” Doesn’t help that every guy I’ve gone out with in this country has a name that starts with T.