Over at The Millions, author Marie Myung-Ok Lee writes about her relationship with her name – as a writer, a daughter of Korean immigrants, and as a Korean-American. She examines how her name has evolved over the years and how deeply names and identity are intertwined.
Here’s a sample:
Not unlike George Herbert Walker Bush, my full legal name, as it reads on my birth certificate, has four pieces, not the usual three.
Marie Myung-Ok Grace Lee.
People assume Myung-Ok is my middle name. But it’s just my name, one that was benched, like a junior varsity player, for my entire childhood, and then revived–but not for the reasons one might think–when I needed an “author name” for my novel.
…
Perhaps the author name is also a brilliant tool that should be used as such. Friends and family call me Marie, and Koreans revert to Myung-Ok—but no one uses both. Marie Myung-Ok Lee then becomes the embodiment of my writing, a protective shell that diverts the attention from that overly open, curious part of me that I need to be able to write in the first place.

What’s the significance of Signify?
On Monday’s episode of
Over the past few years, a crowd of new companies has emerged across tech, finance and health—all sporting a first-name brand. “Oscar,” “Alfred,” “Lola” —they have the look and feel of a friend, a colleague, maybe even your cat. And that’s the point: Make a connection with consumers that even Dale Carnegie would appreciate.

Dr. Cleveland Evans writes about names for the Omaha World-Herald.
Accent marks are missing in place names all over the Bay Area. Many neighborhoods and streets are named after Spanish explorers. Some of those names once had accent marks. But now, without them, we don’t know if we’re saying them right.