Husband, Ernest alone. Only the feds call me that, and only on solemn occasions, now that my father has been dead for 16 years, the first Erman Crew. Fifty years ago, My father took me to open my first bank account, at the Commercial National Bank, the tallest building in Anniston, Alabama, all of 10 stories high. Oh, the power of official naming, on June 22nd in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and forty-eight. And the crowds do not always honor our preference.
Names are also a bit like voice-prints.
That is not the way I sound. Part of that reaction is that the recorder can never pick up the extra resonance our own head gives to the sound as it leaves our body. But another dynamic is at work as well. The taped version teases many of us to project on it our fears of what we don't want to sound like. Those of us who are insecure sometimes hear in the tape recording of our voice the person we fear others take us to be, and many of us.