Reactions about the “F” Word Literature & Language Essay

Reactions about the “F” Word
Name
Institution
Reaction about the “F” Word
Firoozeh notes that the way a person is named determines how people see them. Names can be used as a way of poking fun at others. Some names are seen by native Americans as strange and instead of pronouncing them fully, they refer to them with closest funny name they can find that they are familiar with and it never matters if the name is demeaning or abusive (Dumas, 2004). Americans want a name they can easily pronounce and connect to. When someone’s name is strange, Americans would find it hard to interact with them and allow them in their social cycle. For children, it would be difficult to make friends because the American youth never want to hang out with a person whose name they cannot even pronounce easily. Children would not want to play with those whose names they find difficult to pronounce because they would not be able to remember those names and they would be thought of as dumb. Ideally, the Americans attach so much importance to names that they find the names that are difficult to pronounce funny. Among intellectuals such as college students, there is no so much importance attached to the difficulty of pronouncing a name. However, employers in America find it difficult to hire those whose names they see as strange. It gives Americans comfort and confidence to know that they identify with a name and they can easily pronounce it.
When Dumas noted that “having an American name and speaking English without a foreign accent was like having x-ray glasses”, she was just being honest for it allowed her to see how the Americans clearly felt about the Iranians. If she had shown a hint that she was a foreigner, they would have never truly opened up to her and expressed how they felt about the Iranians. Instead, they could have tried not to hurt her feelings by making negative comments while talking bad behind her back. When she notes that people assumed she was American, she was referring to the ease with which they could pronounce her name and the fact that she spoke English like them. I find this definition wrong because America is known as the land of the free. One should not be surprised to find people speaking in a foreign accent or having unfamiliar names. And yet the implication according to the D...