I think that I'd rather enjoy obliging anyone who requested being called "Lord Spunkypants". But I doubt I'd be able to keep a straight face while doing so.chrisoff wrote:I think it's perfectly reasonable for someone to request that their name isn't shortened, it's their name after all and it's only respectful and polite to address someone as they wish to be addressed (as long as they're not nuts and want to be called Lord Spunkypants or something).fearfaoin wrote: So, I just wanted to say, I think I now understand tal's
request for less informality.
Naming conventions across cultures are a strange beast though. In a previous life I had a lot of dealings with Korean users of an application for a very large oil company and they had an amusing, and slightly irritating, habit of calling us by our surnames Didn't bother me so much but some people had surnames which didn't make for very flattering first names and they got quite annoyed in the end.
More seriously, I think a lot of us prefer to use a shorter form of unfamiliar names because we worry about remembering and pronouncing them correctly if they are too long.
We tend to shorten even long familiar names for ease of use (how many people do you know named "Jonathon", "Alexander", or "Elizabeth" who go by "Jon", "Alex", or "Beth"), but most of us can remember to use the full name if asked - it's in our memory files and doesn't require a lot of thought.
But even easy-to-pronounce Indian names (most of them, for English speakers) don't trigger a "familiar" response - because it is (or appears to be) a unique name, it's harder for us to remember without a lot of repetition. Especially spelling them - our corporate email system uses firstname.lastname@companyname.com as the default naming system. But we're a global company, and even in our home office we have people from all over the world - in practice, it means that even for people I know well I need to use the address book to make sure I spell their name right.
I suspect the issue you mention with Korean users may be something even simpler - I believe that Korea, like China, uses "family personal" rather than our "personal family" name order. Complicating things is that some of our Korean customers, knowing this, will reverse their usual name order when communicating with English speakers, while others won't. And they have the same confusion about us (I have a number of Korean customers who seem to think that my given name was "Crom" - and one even made the connection to the Conan movies & asked me why Der Governator was calling my name so often ) So there's a chance that they really thought that the correct personal name was "Spunkypants".