I went to the University of Chicago, which is considered, as the world reckons these things, a fairly serious place. Heavy, grey, false yet nevertheless massively impressive Gothic architecture. First atom split in a handball court by Enrico Fermi & Co. Enough Nobel prize winners to field a weak softball team. Great books all over the joint. Students determined, in several polls, to have less fun than at any other school in the nation. So why is it that, when the chairman of the university’s Board of Trustees sends me an announcement of the appointment of the school’s new president, just about everyone in the accompanying press release refers to the new president — a musicologist named Don M. Randel — as “Don”? Call him by his first name, and all that is august in his new office slips right off him. Perhaps I ought to be grateful that they don’t refer to him as “Donnie,” or perhaps (who knows?) “Skippy.” But even “Don” feels all wrong. Gravity — it ought to be a law.
The French have the useful verb tutoyer, which means to address another person in the second-person familiar; usually to do so suggests intimacy, but it can also suggest contemptuous familiarity. Since we don’t have a second-person familiar in English, we go to first names. Too readily, in my view. I may be a bit raw here. I’ve been getting Joe’d around a lot lately — better, I suppose, than being Jack’d around, but still more than a little irritating.
I send a fax to a software company, addressed “Dear Sir or Madam” and I get a letter beginning “Dear Joseph” back. Young men with strong New York accents and soft names have been known to telephone me, early in the day, to say, “Joe, Tyler Ginsberg here. Have you heard about these 791 high-yield, tax-free bonds? Now’s the time to make your move.” “Tyler, sweetheart,” I reply, “have we met before?” “No, not really, but these bonds are a terrific . . . ” “Tyler,” I say before hanging up, “go tutoyer yourself, pal.” Lots of telemarketers seem to go to my first name. “Is this Joseph?” they ask. So, increasingly, do merchants and artisans in face-to-face encounters. “Pleased you could come by, Mr. Nelli,” I recently said upon meeting a house painter who had come in to give us an estimate on painting our kitchen. “Call me Chuck, Joe.” I found I couldn’t do it. Henceforth I compromised and called him nothing.
As a university teacher, I continue to call my students by their last names, always preceded by Mr. and Miss. Almost all my colleagues call their students by their first names, and many of them are perfectly happy to allow the students to call them by their own first names. A charming student whom I had befriended dropped by not long after his graduation and called me Joe. I told him I preferred he wait three full years before doing so. Good kid, he did. Another student of mine, whom, after his being out of school for many years, I invited to call me Joseph or Joe, said that he couldn’t do it, and if I didn’t mind he’d like to continue calling me Professor Epstein. Despite the fact that I think of the title “professor” as one best accorded to the guy who plays the piano in the bordello, I didn’t argue the point, and “professor” I remain to him.
I wish I gave off sufficient high dignity to prevent being so often “first-named” by people I would prefer to “mister” me. But I’m not sure anyone today does give off such dignity. I’ve become less convinced, in fact, that a yearning for familiarity, or an attempt to establish fake intimacy, is always at the heart of calling strangers by their first names. In many instances, the persons doing so — telemarketers especially — cannot pronounce a last name of any complication, and so using a first name becomes not a gambit but a necessity. Going at things the other way round, if you ask someone you are dealing with for his name, and he answers “Bob,” he is giving away a lot less than if he had answered “Robert Ortacelli,” his last name at least permitting one to place him ethnically. Insisting on plain “Bob” is perhaps as close as one can come to retaining one’s anonymity; it can be damn chilling, in fact.
The first person to note this tendency of Americans to call one another by first names on short acquaintance — or no acquaintance whatsoever — was an English writer of immitigably highbrow taste and great social hauteur named Vernon Young, whom I met only once. We exchanged perhaps 30 letters, with neither of us ever coming close to addressing the other by his first name. He once wrote to me about how deeply he detested being called Vernon by people who scarcely knew him. “My way of dealing with this,” he noted, “is really quite efficient. I say to them, ‘My close friends call me Vernon. Won’t you do likewise?'” A good thing, of course, that the narrator of Moby Dick wasn’t of a like mind, else that great novel would have begun, “Don’t — whatever you do — call me Ishmael.”
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
