You know it happens to everyone, but it’s still embarrassing: one of your colleagues has been chatting with you for five minutes, and you just can’t remember their name… But why does a person’s first name seem so sacred? And what does your forgetfulness really mean? And more importantly, what can you do about it? Roman Ait Mokhtar addresses these tricky questions.
It’s lunchtime and you find yourself at a table with a colleague whose face is familiar... but what’s his name again? Julian, Samuel? You have a couple of vague ideas, but the slightest mistake would be calamitous! So you go for the old trick: “Alright, mate?”, “How’re you doing, buddy?” Yes, he knows you’ve forgotten, and you know he knows, but neither of you dare broach the subject. So where does this mutual embarrassment come from?
Forgetting a colleague’s first name can be seen as a form of professional misconduct. In The Devil Wears Prada (2006), a cult comedy that follows the life of a staffer at the prestigious Vogue magazine, the intimidating boss (Miranda Priestly, played by Meryl Streep) instructs her new assistant to learn all the names of the guests of a fancy gala they’ll be attending. The idea being that her assistant can then whisper the names to her, so she can pretend to recognise all the people she bumps into.
Etiquette and good manners are essential in professional relations, and knowing the first names of your colleagues, your superiors, and even your clients can be a key part in the role we’re expected to play. Conversely, what we decide to do with another person’s first name can be an efficient rhetorical weapon: a boss can decide not to remember their employees’ first names on purpose or prefer to call them by their last name, to establish a hierarchical relationship. But what about situations that don’t appear to involve any strategic stakes or power relations? Why, away from the fancy galas and hierarchical kowtowing, are we so embarrassed to admit when someone’s name has slipped our mind?
‘Lying is abandonment and, so to speak, negation of human dignity’
—Kant
Coming clean
Of course, not everyone shares these scruples. There are those who will feel the moral obligation to tell the truth, and who won’t hesitate to interrupt their exchange to apologise and ask the other person’s name again. Like the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, they may decide that lying to co-workers to make them feel better challenges their dignity and autonomy. In his 1797 essay On a Supposed Right to Tell Lies from Benevolent Motives, Kant answers those who claim that the truth isn’t always good to say: “It is a commandment of reason which is sacred, absolutely imperative, which cannot be limited by any convenience: in every declaration, one must be truthful.”
To conceal the fact that you’ve forgotten their first name would be to prevent the other person from being fully aware of what is going on between you, and to therefore treat them like a child. You would also be shirking your moral duty and spoiling the quality of your interaction, which would immediately become hypocritical. We should therefore address the elephant in the room, no matter how much awkwardness it causes. In his Doctrine of Right (1797), Kant takes a clear stance on this: “Lying is abandonment,” he writes, “and, so to speak, the negation of human dignity.” But, apart from a few purists, this strategy of radical honesty isn’t for everyone – far from it.
Concealing out of respect
We sometimes behave like a fugitive when we forget someone’s name, trying to act as if nothing has happened. We look for a way around the problem, by speaking without naming them, searching for a name badge around their neck, or discreetly trying to find their LinkedIn profile on our phone. If we’re lucky enough to find a familiar face nearby, we might quietly go and ask them for the other person’s name. In short, we’ll do anything to avoid getting caught. Because we know very well that forgetting someone’s first name isn’t so trivial, no matter what Kantians may say.
For psychologist Devin Ray, forgetting someone’s personal information can deteriorate our social relations with them. He writes: “Evidence of memory in social interactions is a powerful signal of the subjective importance attached to an object of memory and that interpretation of such signals has important consequences for interpersonal relationships.” (“On Being Forgotten: Memory and Forgetting Serve as Signals of Interpersonal Importance”, 2019).
Ray studied the impact of forgetting social information (a person’s name or their background) on a sample of around fifty students, and noticed that the social relations between the “forgetting” and the “forgotten” tend to deteriorate, resulting in vexation and a feeling of distance. In other words, when someone forgets important information about us, we conclude that we don’t matter to them.
‘To know names is to know the nature of things’
—Platon
The culprit knows their forgetfulness will come across as negligence; and it’s therefore because they attach great importance to the first name that they try to cover up their mistake. They know that behind the superficial vexation lies the more visceral, even metaphysical fear: that of disappearing. Plato held that names intrinsically characterised the named person. A first name, like that of Socrates for example, was etymologically meaningful: soos meaning “sain”, and kratos, “power”. The first name says what is, and refers to a being. In fact, if we follow Cratylus’ reasoning, in Plato’s dialogue of the same name, it’s our very existence that is forgotten when others can’t recall our name: “To know names is to know the nature of things.” We tell ourselves that we’ve been overlooked, that they haven’t really noticed us. But could this be a little melodramatic? Maybe. Memory lapses can also happen all of a sudden, without necessarily reflecting an existential rejection of the other.
‘You can remember someone’s first name without really knowing them’
Accepting our ignorance
And then there are those who show a form of indifference towards first names in general. They feel no need to remember them and will happily call others as they please, sometimes inventing nicknames or using other first names. In the famous TV series The Office, one of the main characters (Jim) quickly earns the nickname “Tuna” on his first day in his new position, simply because he happens to eat a tuna-mayonnaise sandwich for his lunch…
These more carefree types would identify with the philosophy of Bertrand Russell, who considered proper nouns to be more of an indefinite description than an absolute designation (On Denoting, 1905) – that is to say, they offer a form of “knowledge by description” which basically means nothing. You can describe an optical illusion without understanding it or knowing anything about optics. Similarly, you can remember a person’s first name without really knowing them at all. It therefore hardly matters whether the person in front of you is called Tom, Dick, or Harry, since their way of speaking, opinions, and sense of humour tell you much more about them than their name or marital status.
But let’s not get carried away either: becoming complacently indifferent wouldn’t be a good thing. In another American study, economists Saku Aura and Gregory D. Hess show that the characteristics of a first name – its cultural origin, the way it sounds, its general aesthetic, etc – all play a role in the construction of social identity. Which is why some will feel offended when their first name is mispronounced or easily forgotten. This is especially true in the case of foreign-sounding first names: to mix up or constantly mispronounce Krishna and Abhishek may seem innocuous, but it can be seen as an implicit form of contempt.
So to escape the forgotten name trap, what stance will you take: that of the puritan truth-speaker, that of the metaphysical drama queen, that of the totally carefree? As we’ve seen, each of these attitudes can be excessive. You just need to apply them in moderation, without losing your composure.
