What's in a name?

"Number 6: Say you're having sex with your wife Kevin, but you're really thinking about supermodel Kevin Schiffer, and in the heat of passion, you yell out 'Kevin!' No problem."
—Top Ten Ways The World Would Be Better If Everyone Was Named Kevin, Late Show with David Letterman

In one Seinfeld episode, Kramer suggests to Mayor Dinkins' campaign advisor a new law where all New Yorkers would be required to wear nametags so we could pass meaningless pseudo-conversation to each other, "Hi ya, Sam. How're you doing, Joe?" Forget for a moment the false familiarity that we New Yorkers — at least those of us who score higher on the sanity test than Kramer does — go out of our way to avoid, has any one considered the enormous variety of bizarre New York names that we should all be just a little afraid to pronounce unassisted? There's umlauts and cedillas, silent consonants and crazy confusing vowel placements, not to mention that 'o' with the slash through it — "the chemical symbol for boron," in Jerry Seinfeld's words. (Its official name is "Latin capital/small O with stroke, although in Danish and Norweigan it's just Ø.")

And someone's name isn't the sort of thing you can screw up either. It encapsulates an entire person in a few phonemes — fuck up someone's name and it's like you bought them a kitschy, crappy, misgendered Christmas gift, which they'll open when they celebrate Hannukah. It's easier to just stay silent, or else stick with some childish nickname such as "dude," "bro," or, if it's been a bad day, "dickweed."

"Remember that a man's name is the sweetest sound to him in any language."
--Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

I guess the only redeeming quality of my name is that it's tough to screw up. Unfortunately, it's also a letter of the alphabet, and not even a popular letter at that. I should've been named "Eeee." Well, at least my parents weren't so nuts as to call me "Latin capital/small O with stroke" or "chemical symbol for boron," although in the latter case, I guess I could've been "Chem" for short.