Coffee Names

In a shocking move, this post has nothing at all to do with any café in Edinburgh. Rather, I want to highlight another post on Brown Pundits about hard-to-pronounce names. Razib Khan mentions how a friend of his was upset when he failed to pronounce her name correctly, even though both of them were Indian in origin. He points out correctly that a) he's from an entirely different section of India (Bengal), and wouldn't know anything about the pronunciation of names in Southern India b) it's perverse to take pride in having an unpronounceable name.

More relevant to this blog, however, is a note in the comments. Basab Pradhan writes:

At Starbucks, after a few hand offs, the name that the Barrista shouts out can be unrecognizable. So I started giving “Bobby” as my name. Easy that way. I know a lot of Indians who similarly have a “Starbucks name”

That's pretty interesting.

So, in the interest of being more culturally and linguistically aware, I will now be marking cafés on whether or not they manage to pronounce my German (and Lithuanian and Jewish) name correctly. If I hear one 'Mr. Lituer?' for 'Littauer', I am going to start giving my name as 'Dr. Prahandeeninadeshnakali' and see how they manage it.