A San Diego caller says he’s noticed that his high-school grandson and his buddies habitually refer to each other only by their last names, but his granddaughter says she and her own friends never do. Is this just a teenage guy thing? The book that Grant recommends here is A Dictionary of Epithets and Terms of Address by Leslie Dunkling. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Referring to Friends by Last Name”
Hi, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, this is Philip Woodson from San Diego, California.
Hiya, Philip.
Hello, Philip. What’s going on?
Well, here’s my question, and a couple of months ago, I was picking up my high school grandson with a bunch of his buddies from school. And so they were hungry, and I took them out to get something to eat. And there I discovered a peculiar way of them talking that’s my question to you today.
They would always refer to themselves in their last name. For instance, it would be like, hey, Sullivan, pass me the ketchup, or Garcia, do you want your french fries, or Hunter, if you’re going to the game tomorrow, can I get a ride with you? Always using the last name.
So I was kind of curious about it, because when I was growing up, too many decades ago, but when I was growing up, we had nicknames for each other, but we didn’t use our last names in talking to each other. But they didn’t seem to think it was unusual, that it was done all the time in a group.
Now, my grandson has a twin sister, my granddaughter, and so I asked her, I said, if there’s a group of girls, do you ever refer to each other with your last name? Like, you know, talk the way you refer to them. She said, never. They would either call themselves by their first name or sometimes by a nickname.
So I guess my question to you is, is this typical just to San Diego, the adolescents here? Is it typical throughout the United States? Is this strictly for adolescents, or is this common in other areas where they would use just the last name?
Well, these are great questions. You mentioned that, as far as you know, quizzing other people in your own experience, that women don’t do this. And I do remember, do you ever see the George Bernard Shaw play the Philanderer?
I’ve read some of his stuff, like Man and Superman, but not that one. Because in there, there’s a club of women who practice all the vices of men. They smoke, drink, they live alone, and they call each other by their last names. And you can read about this sort of phenomenon among young women well into the 20s when there were different kind of movements afoot to bring equality to the way women were treated in a public sphere.
But in any case, that’s a side story there. But the main answer to your question is yes, yes, yes. Yes, it’s common across the United States. It’s common to young men. It’s common to older men. They do it in Germany. They do it in the United Kingdom. They do it throughout the Anglophone world. They do it in Korea, as far as I know. They do it in Russia, too.
What about the women? Do the women ever do that? Women almost never do. Yeah, I never did. In the Anglophone world, if they do, it’s a kind of very conscious decision to emulate the men that are around them. Professionals called each other by their last names.
And from what I understand, the reason that young men do it, we’re talking grade school, junior high, high school, college even, is a kind of, first, it establishes a familiarity. It bonds the group together. And this is so important when you’re that age. And second, it emulates what the older men do. So it’s kind of like they’re trying to seem more masculine by taking on this kind of language.
It’s not something they consciously know that they’re doing in order to try to seem more masculine, but that’s the overall effect of it. The first time I heard it was I actually never had encountered it. I was probably eight or nine when I read my first Hardy Boys book. And Frank and Joe Hardy, they called all of their friends by their last name. I didn’t see it until high school. And then my friends did it, and it seemed natural. And then the Little House on the Prairie Girls didn’t, I assume.
Little House on the Prairie Girls did not. Philip, here’s the thing about all this. We delight in calling people things other than their names. If you want more information on this, because we could talk about this until the end of time.
Yeah, I do. There’s a great book called The Dictionary of Epithets and Terms of Address by Leslie Dunkling. That’s L-E-S-L-I-E. Take a look at that. The introductory matter alone is worth the time that you might spend on it. You could probably find it at a decent price used.
Thank you so much. Hey, Phil, it was a pleasure. Thank you for your call, Philip. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
If you’ve got a question about language, that is usage, grammar, slang, or what have you, give us a call, 1-877-929-9673.
