Embarrassing Names: How Two Women Learned to Live With, and Even Embrace, Their Own

As a child in Australia, Louise Pain hated her surname. Classmates called her things like "Pain in the a*s," and she remembers wanting, actively, to change it. The jokes did not stop when she moved to Germany. What changed was how she felt about the name.

Her story, and that of a Greek woman named Tiny, anchors a DW look at what happens when a name draws ridicule. Psychoanalyst Mikita Brottman says a person's name is vital to their sense of identity, and that when a name is embarrassing, the embarrassment can become part of that identity. Research on name bias has linked negatively perceived names with romantic rejection, lower educational outcomes, lower self-esteem and more frequent smoking. That suggests names may shape a life's course through self-esteem and opportunity.

Personality psychologist Jochen Gebauer describes names as signals at a first meeting. Those signals may fade as people get to know each other, he says, but their effects can also accumulate over a lifetime, potentially producing real measurable advantages and disadvantages. Sociologist Anthony Lee led research finding that a name can evoke inaccurate assumptions about intelligence, competence, trustworthiness, sociability and attractiveness. In his UK-based work, less familiar names tended to fall along a dimension partly characterized as "weirdness," which may help explain why hard-to-pronounce or culturally unfamiliar names are judged more negatively.

For Pain, the reactions went beyond jokes. In high school, a teacher refused to believe Pain was her real surname and reprimanded her in front of the class, telling her, as she recalls, that her name couldn't possibly be Pain and that she should write her real name.

Tiny, now 54, met the same disbelief growing up in Greece. Her parents had adapted "Tiny" to "Tinie" to sound more Greek, yet people kept asking for her real or baptismal name. Even relatives resist it: recently two elderly aunts introduced her to someone as "Haritini," a conventional Greek name. She didn't bother correcting them. Over time, she says, the jokes got repetitive and boring fast, and she was left with the sense of having something unique.

Pain, now 41, saw how much culture shapes reaction when she began learning her father's native French as a teenager. In French, pain means bread, and people began calling her "Louise Bread." After she moved to Germany, the jokes were mostly about bread rather than the scathing ones from Australia. That, she says, helped her feel better about her name.

Both women developed ways to get ahead of reactions. Tiny sometimes opens with, "Hi, I'm Tiny. It's my name and not a statement," or, "I'm Tiny. Not a difficult name to live up to," which usually stops awkward questions. Pain leaned into the humor, once convinced she should become a doctor or a dominatrix, or both, to be "Doctor Pain" or "Mistress Pain." Psychoanalyst Melissa Daum notes that names can conjure a whole spectrum of shame and pride, and that something once felt as an inconvenience can become a marker of distinctiveness, history or belonging.

The discomfort has not vanished. Pain now finds people see her surname as funny and endearing, but when she thinks about having children, it gets complicated. She doesn't really want to pass it on, she says, which points to a deeper wound. Yet she believes her father would be deeply hurt if her children had another name, since the surname ties her to him and to her French heritage.

Tiny describes similar ambivalence. She says her parents seemingly made an unfortunate choice, but she has embraced both the name and its uniqueness. She still avoids it on dating apps, where it might send the wrong message, and leaves it out of her email address when she wants to look professional. Pain uses a Germanized version of the French word for bread as her social media surname. Daum says choosing one's own name online can feel like an act of mastery.

Pain once wanted to change her surname; Tiny considered using her middle name in her thirties. Neither did. Tiny can now picture keeping the name for life: it might be cute, she says, to eventually be a granny called Tiny.