People’s first name: Marie-Anne or confusion

OAll of them, I think, have experienced a first name confusion. Getting tangled up with a first name happens to us, and we forget it. But being the object of confusion is remembered a little more. I can no longer count the times I have been decked out with a “John the Baptist”. Decked out! (do you feel annoyance?)

But this is nothing in the face of the torture of linguist Marie-Anne Paveau. In “Horrors and misfortunes of a first name”, she remembers the transformations of which her identity is permanently the object. It becomes, on plane tickets, e-mail headers, and even on a credit card issued by her bank, “Anne-Marie” or “Marianne”. It must then request rectification.

“It is a problem of frequency”, she writes. Marie-Anne is too rare, and “Appears to be counter-intuitive compared to the frequent Anne-Marie”. And a question of exposure: those close to Marie-Anne (or Baptiste), repeatedly exposed to this first name, even globally rare, will make fewer mistakes. And as far as I’m concerned, it comes down to a question of age: the youngest, more exposed to a Baptist now more frequent than John the Baptist, are not mistaken.

Marwan becomes Marianne

Marie-Anne’s daily life is then made up of anticipations and negotiations, when others have to write her first name. He must be politely reminded that his first name is not simple. It “Draw the formula “in two words, with a hyphen” “ to avoid the “oh yes damn-erasure-correction” episode. My anticipation is a little different: I always spell the first three letters “Baptiste, B, A, P…”, to avoid adding the Jean and forgetting the “silent p”.

My sociologist colleague Marwan Mohammed has other expectations: avoid confusion with his namesake Marwan Muhammad, and specify that his first name is not Marouane, and his name is not Mohamed. But “With a w and two m in the name” was not enough. When he was invited in mid-March on Europe 1, the radio site proudly announced the arrival of… Marianne Mohammed.