Gonna briefly talk about anglicising names. TL;DR, I hate it. Use your name name. English names are boring and consist of Mary, Margaret, John, Edward, and Jon again but spelled different.

I've repeatedly told y'all my father was a Hungarian refugee. Most of his family that fled either WWII or the aftermath of the Revolution when the Russians were just randomly killing unarmed Hungarians ended up in the US.

My particular branch had to get out get out now or die. As in the Austrian police were holding off the Secret Police while my grandparents were bundling up my father and getting on the first plane out of Europe so they ended up in Argentina.

My grandparents actually kept their names because my grandmother was Anna and ... there's no translation of Tibor. There just isn't. Maybe Tiberius, but we're reaching. But they gave my aunt a Spanish name and my father went by the Spanish version of his own name.

When they moved to the states later on my father started using the *English* version of his name but kept the Spanish spelling. So this means that his birth certificate, his passport and what he's generally called are all completely different.

And, like, I dunno if you have ever tried to read Hungarian but there are MANY vowels. And sometimes "gy." My father's proper name is one syllable but somehow there's like five vowel sounds and two of those "gys."

To that end I do kinda get why he lets people call him by an English name because, I mean, I let people call me Ari as long as they haven't been dicks. (Genuinely make people call me Dr. Schulz if they try to be jerks to me though.)

Last joke before the meat of this, his use of an Anglicised name did get him confused with a former Secretary of State. This was entertaining to me, but it's also why I insist on my Greek princess name.

1. My name rocks.
2. You're unlikely to confuse me with anyone else.

The rest of my Hungarian family living in the US go by the Anglicised versions of their names. I hate it. I call them by their Hungarian names because the Hungarian names sound WAY cooler and are also not dumb.

But the other thing is my mom growing up in Chicago lived next to this Japanese family. So her grandma and their grandma sort of traded off child watching duties. Some days all the kids would go to my great-grandmothers and other times to the other kids' house.

So the Japanese grandmother insisted on being called obaachan. Which literally means "grannie." For Japanese this is pretty typical because you don't just call your own grandma "grandma," you call any old woman that, you call little boys "little brother" ...

... you call girls about your age or slightly older "big sister," and so on. So that bit's totally normal. Probably because she was caring for my mom and uncle on the days when her grandkids weren't being looked after by my great grandma she wanted the familiar "chan," as well.

But the reason I bring this up is the grandkids in question were named something like Bob and Sydney. (Not their actual names but I don't personally know them and I don't want to freak them out.)

These kids were ... nisei? So it was reasonable for them to have either Japanese or English names, but their grandma wanted to be called grandma in Japanese and these two kids are running around with completely Anglo names.

Given the time having the Anglo names was probably good for them, but it does feel like cultural erasure. This does happen *less* with particularly Japanese-Americans now ... I do meet Japanese-Americans whose parents were like, "nope, you get a Japanese name."

Still pretty rare though and among Chinese it is UNHEARD OF. Now, again there's some advantages to using an Anglo name. Like I said, my father's name cannot be pronounced by most non-Hungarians. That's not a joke. Hungarian's a weird language.

And Chinese ... I mean, it's tonal. So when I've run into people coming to an English speaking country to study most of them have an English name that they use instead of their real name. When I was studying Mandarin I was given a Mandarin name to go by. (It's also awesome)

So I do get it because again, people are always like "Hi, am I speaking to [long pause] Ardri ... Aubrey ... uh ... huh. Arienne? Arwen?" I often let it go for it amuses me and my heart is made of obsidian. But I have had a few idiots insist my name is a misspelling.

But it really concerns me that a lot of people are erasing their culture and language to fit in. In the case of my mom's Japanese school buddies, that was about two decades after internment so there's a good possibility they were afraid of appearing too Japanese.

But just imagine that if you can. Some of you don't have to, but you whiteys out there, just imagine being afraid to be yourself in the place that you live. I really hate that people don't feel that they can use their ethnic names.

And I get that I kinda don't have a claim to my own. I mean, I'm half Hungarian, half Danish. There's not a drop of Greek in me and yet I've got this super ancient Greek name. But it's AWESOME. You will never confuse me with anyone.

Yeah, no one can pronounce my name or these supposedly ethnic names but ... they should get over it and learn. I let people call me "Ari" for expediency and everyone else with a crazy name has something you can use until you get it.

Also, have you ever tried to read English history? It's the worst. I read a history of the women in the War of the Roses and everyone was named Margaret, Mary, or Elizabeth. Thank GOD for the Earl of Warwick because he was the only one with any creativity.