What did you just call me?

Sandra Parshall

I once had a doctor, my junior by 10 or 15 years, who always addressed me as “young lady.” He probably thought he was being charming. I thought he was being condescending and irritating as hell.

Yet I never asked him to stop. There’s something about the doctor-patient relationship that makes many people afraid to offend anyone wearing a white coat, even when the doctors themselves are relentlessly offensive.

But that was then. I probably wouldn’t put up the “young lady” stuff now. In recent years I’ve had enough bad experiences with doctors to cure my reticence and deference.

I started thinking about all this last week after reading a New York Times essay by a woman doctor who has noticed an increase in “chummy” behavior from patients. More and more patients, she says, are calling doctors by their first names. At first she thought it was happening only to female physicians, and in her own case the overly friendly patients are mostly older men. But she’s heard from male doctors who also say that some patients, men and women alike, address them by their first names without being invited to do so. She wonders if it makes the patients feel less vulnerable if they can dispense with the doctor’s title.

Personally, I would never address a doctor by his or her first name. I don’t want doctors calling me Sandra either, but I’ve known some who did. A study published in the British Medical Journal showed that a majority of patients surveyed, particularly older patients, want their doctors to address them by their first names. But this older patient does not. I’m not entirely sure why I feel this way, though. Maybe I simply feel safer when the relationship is professional and dignified in every sense. A 35-year-old doctor addressing me by my first name, while expecting me to call him Doctor, is just as demeaning as being called “young lady.”

The doctor’s Times essay pointed out that nurses – the people who really hold our lives in their hands when we’re hospitalized – are routinely addressed by their first names, not just by doctors but by patients. Every nurse I’ve encountered in recent years has introduced herself only by her first name but has usually addressed me as Mrs. Parshall. That’s just the way things are in the medical profession, I guess, and it seems to be accepted by everyone involved. I find it jarring, though, when a nurse calls me by my first name the minute she meets me. I can’t very well object, though, can I? After all, I’m calling her by her first name.

When I thought about it, I realized that every encounter has its own etiquette rules regarding names. At the grocery store, where I see the same clerks every week but never get to know them, I am on a first-name basis with them but they always call me Mrs. Parshall. At the salon where I have my hair cut, everybody calls me Sandra. Department store clerks are trained to thank customers by name, but I would be shocked if a store employee ever said, “Thanks, Sandra.” I don’t know how to address department store clerks, so I never use their names at all.

Waiters and waitresses? Plumbers? Yard workers? Most of the time I never learn their last names, and they always call me Mrs. Parshall. What we call each other is a sure sign of our relative status. Anybody who thinks America is a classless society should pay attention to how people address one another.

All of us in the book world, I’m happy to say, are on a first-name basis. A writer may start a query letter to an agent with “Dear Ms. Jones” but once the representation contract is signed Ms. Jones promptly becomes Jane. Writers call their editors – and people higher up in the publishing chain – by their first names. It’s all very friendly. True, that agent or editor or publisher may control the writer’s work and dreams and destiny, but they don’t demand formality while they go about it.

What do you prefer to be called? Would you ever call your doctor by his or her first name? Do you want a doctor to address you by your given name? Have you ever been offended when someone you’d just met used your first name?

Whatever you call yourself or wish others to call you, I hope you have a lovely holiday season!

The Naming of Characters

Sandra Parshall

T.S. Eliot wrote, “The naming of cats is a difficult matter,” and as a lifelong cat-owner, I agree -- but choosing a name for a fictional character takes difficulty to a whole new level. It’s a lot like naming a child. The recipient will live with your decision forever, and if you make a mistake the consequences won’t be pretty.

A baby, of course, is named before the parents have any idea how the kid will turn out. Will little Angelina develop into a tattooed hellion? Will Grace be a hopeless klutz? Or will their names in some way help to shape the people they become? I’m sure that somebody, somewhere, has spent a breathtaking amount of money studying such questions, but fortunately writers don’t have to wonder. We can form the characters, then give them names that suit. We can try out as many names as we like before deciding.

A character’s name has to do a lot of heavy lifting:

It should evoke personality. If a guy is always called Robert, never Bobby or even Bob, what does that say about him?

If ethnicity is important to the story, the name should convey that too. But you don’t have to call every Hispanic character Jose Gonzales. A little effort will turn up less common names that still tell the reader how to see the person.

A name can be a quick way to signal social status. I am not brave or foolish enough to reel off a list of low-class names and risk the fallout, but you know what I mean.

A name can tell us a character’s approximate age. How many toddlers do you know who are named Hortense or Archibald? How many 80-year-old women have you met who are named Britney or Morgan? The internet allows writers to search databases such as www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/ (compiled from Social Security records) and www.babycenter.com/general/ to find out what a character born in a certain year might have been named. Because I prefer classic names rather than the trendy concoctions that are going to seem laughable when their owners hit middle age and beyond, I’m happy to note that Emma has been the most popular name for baby girls in the U.S. for several years. We may have Ross and Rachel on Friends to thank for this. (I have a five-year-old named Emma, but although she believes herself to be an unusually hirsute little girl, she’s actually of the feline persuasion.) All those tiny Emmas, though, are growing up with a nearly equal number of girls named Madison. Aiden was the top male name in 2006, followed by Jacob, Ethan, Ryan, and Matthew. What will Madison and Aiden call their children twenty-five years from now?

The classics fit people of any age, but if the first name is a common one, the last might have to do double duty to give the character distinction. Kate is one of the most common names for female protagonists in mysteries, followed closely by all the variations of Katherine/Catherine/Kathleen -- Kat/Cat/Kathy/Katie/Kay. But Kate Shugak is singular, and so is Kay Scarpetta. In my new book, Disturbing the Dead, I named a lead character Tom Bridger, pairing a first name that conveys a solid, down-to-earth personality with a last name that is common among Melungeons in the Appalachians. The name Bridger is also a metaphor for the position that Tom, a half-Melungeon deputy sheriff, occupies between two segments of his mountain community. The reader may never think about this, but I have.

Sometimes a perfect name comes to a writer through sheer serendipity. When Tess Gerritsen was writing a book titled The Surgeon, she contributed to a charity auction by allowing a reader to purchase naming rights for a minor character, a female medical examiner. The reader named Dr. Maura Isles after a real person. The character grew in importance in subsequent books, and she grew into her name, which perfectly conveys the image of an elegant woman who is isolated within herself.

While searching for the perfect monikers for our characters, writers have to keep some no-no’s in mind: nothing that is impossible for the reader to pronounce; no two names starting with the same letter, lest the poor reader become confused; as few nicknames as possible, again to avoid confusion. Short, one-word names always have the edge, at least in English-language crime fiction. Look at a few U.S., Canadian, and British mystery novels. How many names of more than two or three syllables do you see? How many truly unusual names do you see? You could say this is laziness on the part of writers who don’t want to type long or difficult names again and again, and you might be half-right, but it’s also true that a mystery seems to move faster if everyone has a short, easy name.

A name is the most personal thing about a character, and the choice is not one the writer makes lightly. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could exercise the same discretion over our own names? As innocent babies, we have to take whatever label is slapped on us, whether it fits or not. But most names, amazingly enough, turn out to be good fits. How about yours? Do you love it, hate it, wish you could change it? What name would you have given yourself, and why?