{"id":43072,"date":"2026-03-20T22:05:26","date_gmt":"2026-03-20T22:05:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/?p=43072"},"modified":"2026-03-20T22:05:29","modified_gmt":"2026-03-20T22:05:29","slug":"whose-comfort","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2026\/03\/20\/whose-comfort","title":{"rendered":"Whose comfort?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Tamara Jernigan, American astronaut<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Earlier today I saw a short video on Facebook or Instagram, I forget which, by a woman called Tamara who migrated from Croatia to the United States (I don’t know which part). I saw the video when I had just arrived from work; when I tried to open the app again to re-watch the video and maybe reply, the app had refreshed and the video had gone, so I have no way of finding it or its author. Tamara is married to a man I’m guessing is from Taiwan: he has a Chinese name spelled the “old way” which I also can’t remember. Their new friends habitually call her ‘T’ and her husband also a pair of letters because their names are supposedly too foreign or unfamiliar for them to try to pronounce. Americans, she said, always favour ‘comfort’ over accuracy and it was nothing personal. I disagree: to not even bother to try to pronounce someone’s name is simply lazy and disrespectful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The name Tamara is not even difficult to pronounce in the least. It’s not even a name that is unknown in the US. Wikipedia has a list of famous people with that name and there are a number in the US: Tamara Braun (actress), Tamara Brooks (choral conductor), Tamara Feldman (actress), Tamara Hope (Canadian actress and musician), Tamara Johnson-George (volleyball player), Tamara Stocks (basketball player), Tamara Jernigan (astronaut), though maybe that’s over these people’s heads, figuratively if not literally. In Judy Blume’s ‘Fudge’ book series, the title character has a younger sister born during the series called Tamara Roxanne, though they end up calling her Tootsie. Americans tend to pronounce it with the stress on the middle syllable rather than the first as the Croatian Tamara pronounces her name, but still, it’s not at all unfamiliar. When I mentioned this in a social media post earlier, someone pointed out that the name Tamara has the same consonants as the word ‘tomorrow’, so there’s no real excuse to just shorten it to ‘T’ (not even Tammy or for that matter Tootsie).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was reminded of the chapter in Maya Angelou’s childhood autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings<\/em>, where she works as a servant to a wealthy local white woman, Viola Cullinan. She was named Marguerite Johnson at birth; the employer first calls her Margaret and then, at her friends’ suggestion, Mary. A colleague had been similarly renamed from Hallelujah to Glory, simply because she couldn’t be bothered to call her by her real name. (Angelou’s family called her Ritie; the name Maya originated with her brother who always called her “my sister” and this became My and then Maya.) The young Maya was not going to “let a white woman change her name for her own convenience” and explained that most Black people she knew were horrified by being “called out of their name”, in large part from being referred to by derogatory racial terms for generations. She dropped some precious crockery which Cullinan’s mother had brought from Virginia, and Cullinan was distraught. Her friend demanded, “was it Mary?” to which Cullinan responded, “her name’s Margaret, God damn it!”. As she fled the scene and never went back to the house, we don’t know if Viola Cullinan continued treating her employees in that way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chinese names are a bit more tricky, as they are tonal and getting the tone wrong can make a name mean something completely different (the word ‘Ma’ in Mandarin has five meanings including mother and horse, all differing by tone), but refusing to pronounce a mildly foreign name just sounds like racism. The attitude is that they are the dominant race in the world’s biggest superpower and they have no need to learn anything about any language or culture besides their own. Whether the people concerned say it’s “nothing personal” is immaterial; it’s plain rude and insulting to refuse to call someone by their name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Image source: NASA<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earlier today I saw a short video on Facebook or Instagram, I forget which, by a woman called Tamara who migrated from Croatia to the United States (I don’t know which part). I saw...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":43073,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"New post at Indigo Jo Blogs -- Whose comfort? (On refusing to pronounce someone's name because it's \"too foreign\".)","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-racism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/tamara-jernigan.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-bcI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43072"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43072\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43074,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43072\/revisions\/43074"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}