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Calling Names · Letter to America

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: We were walking the dogs and chatting with friends from the park when a guy we'd never met came along.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: We were introduced, and after chatting a bit, he asked me, Where are you from from?
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: An expat seeing me as a fellow expat and wanting to know where I was from before moving to Turkey.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: I replied, Buktere, the Bosphorus village where my great grandparents lived and my grandparents grew up.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't probe further, and I let it stand.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: It reminded me of the first time I really heard that phrase, from from.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: A friend once described a scene in Arizona where her sister was chatting with someone who asked her where she was from.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: She said Arizona.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: The quizzical lady asked, No, before that.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: To which she replied, Oh, before that, New York.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: Finally, the exasperated lady reached out towards her face, her hand gesturing to indicate her appearance, and said, No, where are you from from?
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: The naming of cats is indeed a delicate matter.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: The name you're born with, the one you're given, and the one only you know yourself as.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: My wife was named Amy and has said that her brother and sister had the cooler names.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: I have a million nicknames for her, and at some point one of them stuck.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: First as a professional name, and then what she actually goes by.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: Mimi.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Alistair Cook, in his Letter from America BBC broadcast, blundered into this space in a May 1965 letter about the heavyweight bout between Ali and Liston.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: It was 15 months after the champ had taken the name Muhammad Ali.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Cook calls him Clay four times, and never Ali.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: In the very archive of the show, this one descends from.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Last Thursday, the President of the United States signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: On American federal maps and in American federal records, it is now Lake America.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: The order reaches no further than that.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Canadian charts, the world's atlases, and the lake itself continue as before.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: Asked what message the renaming sent, the president said no message, and then said that Canada had been ripping America off on trade for a long time.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: The Prime Minister of Canada responded with the name's biography.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Ontario comes from Ontario, a windot word meaning the lake is beautiful, the lake is big, in use for more than 400 years, longer than either country asking.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: The Premier of Ontario called the president a dictator and a bully.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: On Saturday, on his way to his golf club, the president posted an AI-generated video of Canada geese wearing his hair and carrying rifles, marching beside a shore labeled Lake America, while fireworks went off behind them.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: His supporters named the geese Donald Ducks.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: A second video the same day showed the president kicking over the Welcome to Lake Ontario sign and standing up a new one in its place, Lake America.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'm at a loss for what to call it.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Ironically, figuring out what to call things is a big part of my consulting practice.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: Brand marketing at its core is about names, chosen, given, identified with, belong to.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: A brand was never really what a business says about itself.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's what people decide the name says about them, when they buy it, when they wear it, when they're seen with it in public.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Ask Cracker Barrel.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: Last summer the restaurant chain refreshed its logo, retiring the old man who had leaned against a barrel beside the name since 1977.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: The name itself didn't change.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't matter.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Within days, the company had shed something like$100 million in market value, and within a week, the old man was back.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: The customers hadn't been consulted on the redesign, but then it was never really the company's old man to retire.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: Millions of people had long since decided what he said about them, and they weren't letting a marketing department repossess it.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: In my trade, we call that brand equity.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: What it shows is that the name has stopped belonging to you.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's not your name.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: Which brings us to mine.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: Before I was born, my parents endeavored to come up with a name that could feel familiar and relatable in as many places and languages as possible.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: The three times I came across someone with my exact name, pronounced the same way, are telling.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: The first was when I went to see the first Star Wars movie in East Lansing, Michigan, the summer of 1977.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: I had just turned eight that Memorial Day weekend.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: Sitting there and seeing solo flying at the speed of light and helping to save the galaxy changed everything.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: From that day forward, my name was never mispronounced as Han, rhyming with Can.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: And whenever, wherever we gathered to play Star Wars in a playground, my role was obvious.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: My name went from a weird, hard-to-pronounced name to cool in one weekend.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: Years later, at a dinner party at a restaurant in Hong Kong, I was introduced to a guy with exactly my name, a Dutchman.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: And decades after that, I sat in a meeting at Jabbit Center in New York, where I was a guest speaker.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: While they were wrapping up the topics before my presentation, they reviewed the to-dos for the project being discussed and who they were assigned to.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: A bunch of them had my name next to them, and when I was given the floor, I jokingly asked how I could be responsible for so many tasks on a project I'd only just heard of.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: A young Korean American woman in the back of the room laughed heartily, the first to notice what no one else had.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: We had the same name.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: The very city I'm sitting in, as I write, has an interesting name.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: A name that was settled on, not born with, not given, not secret.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: For centuries, the official name was Constantinople, Constantinie, on the coins, on the paperwork, kept there by the conqueror who took the city in 1453 and saw no reason to change it.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, everyone heading here just said that they were going to the city.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: Turkish mouths shortened it and kept it, and in 1929, the new republic wrote a letter to the postal union in Bern asking the rest of the world to use the nickname.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: This is Handalin from Istanbul.