I am abuzz with curiosity about this title you have given yourself . . .

There was once a place near where my parents lived, a privately owned beauty parlor housed in a quaintly kitschy pink pseudo-Mediterranean house wildly out of place in its north coast lumber mill town, named The Beauty Hive. Everything was so potentially wrong, anachronistic, tacky and off-kilter about the place that I had to assume that, rather than producing a continuous line of beehive-sporting, overdressed, elderly women clad in shabby 1962 Dior knockoffs, it was a knowingly winking hip place. I never saw anyone actually emerge re-coiffed from its portal, but hoped in my heart that its name and oddball character were conscious tweaks of the nose of snobbery from a smart marketer.

All of this, perhaps, because I am a horrible snob and hung up on old-fashioned ideas I probably should have long ago given up myself.

One of the many things about which I have rather peculiar and specific ideas (tastes, to be sure, but I tend to treat them almost as law) is the subject of names. I have very strong likes and dislikes among names–fewer, thankfully, of the latter than the former–a great curiosity about the whys and wherefores of someone or something having a particular name, and a fairly rigid belief that one should call a person by the name he or she wishes you to use, whether it “feels” right or not.

By that I mean that there are people who, the instant you meet them, introduce themselves and then say, “but call me [such and such]–everybody does”. Then ‘such and such’ it is. Some are very dependent upon their honorifics for a clear sense of identity (or to shore up an insecure ego), and if one introduces or signs himself as The Very High Reverend Mister Doctor Esophagus, Esquire, then I will jolly well address him by that extravagant title when calling him “by name” (if not just Sir or Your Holiness) until he explicitly permits me to do otherwise–even if I can’t help chortling in private over such pretentious foolishness from a guy greeting me in a grocery queue. I notice that there are plenty of people using their titles in places where their titles have no real meaning, like the academics parading around as Professor Phlegmatic or Doctor Stricture while at their own doctor’s office for a mole removal or the local natatorium for a brisk dip; what has their research and lecturing work to do with their current activity?

I’m equally prickly, though, about people giving titles–spontaneously or otherwise–where they are not requested or even not welcome. When I was a university lecturer, I never applied for the status of tenure-track, and having worked my way through from a starting point of one-class-at-a-time adjunct to full-time teacher over my first couple of years, my official status as a pedagogue remained Lecturer throughout my decades of teaching. I found it a mildly annoying misnomer, then, to be addressed as Professor, not being even an Assistant or Associate Professor let alone “full” (and it seemed extra-ridiculous to be called Lecturer Sparks), so with my classes I made it clear at the outset that I preferred to be on a first-name basis with all of the other serious-minded scholars in the room. If an individual student, personally or culturally, was uncomfortable with first-name familiarity, they were welcome to have me call them Mr. or Mrs. or Dr. and could certainly call me Mrs. or Ms. Sparks, something I actually was whether in the classroom or not. My other official title during my academic years (Curator of Visual Resources, my nom-de-guerre as gallery director at the university) would have been even more asinine used in that setting, because to me it represented the slippery but obvious granting of a mock-shiny and slightly suspect tiara in lieu of a raise. I did have one student that insisted very pointedly on calling me Professor Sparks long after repeated polite requests that he do otherwise, and it came as no surprise that when he was later called to task for clearly choosing to omit a specific stated requirement in an assignment, his response was to threaten me with physical violence in front of the whole class. Really, just how maladjusted does one have to be to need so desperately to mess with another person’s name?

The most truly over-sensitive point with me is that of nicknames. I think I can understand the desire to fit in that drives most nickname use: it implies casual and relaxed attitudes (great in a sports setting or a club, for instance) and an intimacy between people that many find less distancing and formal and fussy than their whole or given names. In some cases, it’s clearly a welcome rescue from being saddled with a name they’re not too fond of in the first place. Sometimes it’s from having a family name that’s too hard to separate. My husband shares his first name with his father, a good name indeed, and yet is not a Junior because their middle names differ. But despite his parents’ initial assumption that they would differentiate between the two by simply calling their son by his middle name, other family members and friends immediately gave him a nickname, diminutive of the first name, and it stuck instead. The result was mainly that if anyone did call my spouse by his full first name, it was assumed the reference was to his dad (or that the son was in Big Trouble). Pity, really, because both men are wonderful, quite distinct from each other, and both in my view well fitted with that great first name they share.

My spouse and I reached a point in life and in his career where he just wanted to enjoy using his real, full first name and be done with the imposed nickname. He had long been known by his full name in Europe and Canada and only gone by the old ‘shorthand’ version back at home for some time now. So he politely let people know, and over time the general response, even among those who have known him since he was a little squirt, has been a gradual re-habituation and our getting to have my partner be known to others by the name we know as his.

I underwent the same process but made the switch a bit longer ago. Growing up, I was a Kathy. I don’t know who first called me that. But by the time I joined six other Kathys and Cathys and Cathies and so forth in one classroom I was beginning to reassess the beauty of my given name of Kathryn. I’ve always liked it, but found like most kids (including the aforementioned boy) that if someone else pastes a nickname on you and you don’t rebel against it for any reason, you’re stuck. I had nothing against being a Kathy–but didn’t enjoy disappearing among a multitude of them. And since I was really fond of the name my parents gave me, why not use it? It’s remarkable how firmly we get it fixed in our heads what a person should be called. My husband found it tricky to ease longtime friends and relatives into calling him what they thought of as his father’s name. I have a similar circle so ingrained with the habit of calling me by my diminutive that there are still random moments of “Kathy” popping up in my presence.

Thing is, I haven’t thought of myself as Kathy since I first decided to revert to what I think of as my real name. When people address me by the nickname in print, it’s a safe bet they’re complete strangers assuming unwanted familiarity with me. When they do so in person, I often fail to respond, simply because I don’t “hear” that name as mine at all anymore–you must be talking to someone else!

There have been a rare few that christened me successfully with other nicknames (some of them even repeatable in public!). I can think of maybe two people who have ever called me Kate, both of whom knew me well enough that I considered it an honorific title specific to them. One aunt affectionately named her über-pasty niece Caspar after the friendly cartoon ghost character. My immediate family and some good friends call me Kat or Kath, which is comfortably casual without being the potentially demeaning diminutive of my (officially) immature years. A few who share or are pleased by my Norwegian ancestry even call me by my middle name of Ingrid. Also pleasing, not least of all because I got that name in honor of my dear aunt.

Then there are the ones, not quite like that borderline-torturer former student but still wanting to be pesky, that choose names for me or anyone else without permission and based on their desire to irritate and irk. Siblings are, of course, very fond of pulling that stunt. Mine chose the nickname for Kathryn that I openly disdained, if not hated, most. Kitty. Any time they really wanted to get under my skin, especially in public, they might slip in that name. Don’t get me wrong, while it’s more of a diminutive than I would ever call a favorite tag per se, it’s not a name I hate in general, just the one that I thought most ill-suited for me.

Finally I got smarter than to react with the sort of crabbiness that so pleased my sisters when they called me Kitty. I usurped the name. I was graduating from college and taking out a business license to sell my artworks on commission, and it occurred to me that if I stole the name Kitty it wouldn’t have half the cachet for my sisters to torment me with anymore. It just needed to be a really obvious bit of silliness that could take the edge off any serious-seeming warfare. That was when I remembered the similarly obvious bit of silliness at that weird beauty parlor near Mom and Dad’s. So I took out a license under the business name of Miss Kitty’s Beauty Hive, a title that remained (though eventually discreetly and more conveniently shortened to MKBH) for a good twenty years. Can’t make fun of me by calling me something I call myself!

So maybe I have to relent and let people call me Kathy again. Even though I so deeply don’t feel like a Kathy anymore–that’s someone I was thirty years ago and no longer know. More likely, I’ll try to keep gently introducing myself as Kathryn, the name my parents loved enough to lay on me at birth, and just smile sweetly when any other title comes my way. It’s all about the tone, the intent.

As for the Embalming Emporium of today’s post title, that just goes with my general sense that if I want to stand out from the crowd–whether of multitudinous iterations of Kathy and Catherine or of bloggers or of artists or of ordinary human beings–I may as well crown myself with the laurels of some seriously distinctive and humorously provocative title. Plus, if I get enough response to it, I can always look into taking up business under yet another name that has little to do with my actual business and everything to do with deciding myself what I want to be called.