Word: naming
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...business owner in the Midwest, who asked not to be identified by his real name, experienced his switch at a dinner party two years ago. Bob had battled alcohol dependency for several decades, regularly drinking at least 35 beers a week. Normally he would have downed several glasses of wine before dinner, he says, but that night, after taking baclofen for two weeks, he found himself sipping soda water instead, engrossed in conversation. "I realized I wasn't having that nagging feeling in my head, 'I should really get a drink,'" says Bob. "It never appeared during the dinner either...
...original version of this article misspelled Dr. Olivier Ameisen's last name...
KYETUME, Uganda—It took me no fewer than five clumsy introductions to catch on to why I kept forgetting the names of people here. The distinct sounds that natives uttered after I’d casually call myself only “Ahmed” weren’t first names that came in the form of two or three Lugandan words. Rather, I eventually discovered, when Ugandans tell new acquaintances their names, they often do so in reverse order: They say their last name first, followed by their first name...
Intrigued by this simple-sounding observation, I asked one of the project leaders of the NGO for which I’m working to explain. After the hour-long discussion that ensued with Nakalinzi Maureen (last name first), I came away with not only a newfound awareness of Ugandan culture, but also with a deeper appreciation of my own last name...
...Bugandan’s last name is what brands him or her as a member of the Bugandan kingdom, Maureen told me. And the further you go down the name hierarchy, she said—to the tribe and then the clan levels—the more prominent a social role a last name plays. For example, though membership to any one clan can number in the thousands, no two people of the same clan—that is, two people out of hundreds who share the same last name—can marry...