Abstract
Toward the end of the academic semester at CSU in late May 2007, Nashville, one of the students in my Level 5 Academic Writing course, asked me to come to the “English Lounge” to give a presentation. Open seven nights a week throughout the school semester, the English Lounge was a student-run organization and event space that provided CSU students with a place to practice English in a comfortable and informal environment. With its large selection of English-language videos, newspapers, board games, and magazines, it was one of the most well-known and well-attended co-curricular English programs at CSU. Already wondering why students spent so much of their free time in the evenings studying English and reasoning that most students would not be interested in another of my lectures on academic writing and how to organize paragraphs and reports, I asked Nashville if I could give a talk about English names in China. She checked with the lounge staff who said that my topic “sounds very interesting” and that they would be happy if I talked about whatever interested me. Nashville added, “And you seem so interested in our English names.”
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Notes
- 1.
Holliday (1994) defines BANA as Britain, Australia, and North America.
- 2.
Makoni et al. (2007) offer a much more complex and thorough analysis of English naming in Zimbabwe. Similarly to this chapter, they draw on ethnographic data and interviews that are often missing from media reports and large-scale surveys.
- 3.
http://www.sexybeijing.tv/new/video.asp?id=15 (accessed December 13, 2015).
- 4.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3U5u3D2L9Q (accessed June 5, 2008).
- 5.
Some foreigners who laugh at Chinese English names are likely perplexed about whether to laugh with or laugh at the Chinese people who have named themselves in this way. Many foreigners are uncomfortable because they are not sure if the humorous name choice was made accidentally or on purpose. There is a stereotype of Chinese people as humorless, which would lead to the conclusion that the humorous name choices are accidental and embarrassing. Many of the consciously humorous names used by my CSU students and in films like Lost in Translation run counter to this stereotype.
- 6.
The English names presented in the data sections are the students’ chosen names. Their Chinese names are omitted to protect confidentiality, except where permission was granted. The participating students agreed to allow me to use their English names.
- 7.
https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/ (accessed December 14, 2015).
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McPherron, P. (2017). “My Name is Money”: English Names and Creative Play Inside and Outside the Classroom. In: Internationalizing Teaching, Localizing Learning. Language and Globalization. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51954-2_4
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