Op-ed: Weiner like me
By Eric Weiner
Silver Spring, Md. — It's never easy being a Weiner, but I can't recall a week as difficult as this one. I desperately want to escape myself, but I can't. I am everywhere. Today, I learned I have few allies, even among Democrats, and that I may have given public relations advice to a porn star. My wife, though, is standing by me. For now.
Representative Anthony D. Weiner, the congressman from New York (no relation, as far as I know), has rendered my life a lot less fun. I'm afraid to Google myself, normally one of my favorite activities, lest I find myself confronted with those now-ubiquitous bulging shorts. (Not my shorts, just to clarify.) I've become adept at hiding the morning news before my 6-year-old daughter asks, again, "Dad, why is our name in the newspaper?" In the digital age, we are yoked, for better or worse, to those with whom we share certain letter combinations. Names matter, now more than ever.
The truth is I don't know how to feel about my namesake, caught recently with his pants (nearly) down. On the one hand, as a fellow Weiner, I feel his pain. On the other hand, he has given us Weiners a bad name, and let's face it: we didn't have a great one to begin with. It wasn't easy growing up a Weiner. Kids possess a special talent for cruelty, one that I now realize is rivaled only by that of headline writers. I'm having serious junior high school flashbacks.
We Weiners, though, are eminently adaptable. It's a survival thing. At some point, my father, Seymour, changed the pronunciation of our family name from WEEN-er to WHINE-er because, really, who wants to be known as Seymour WEEN-er? It was a Faustian bargain, to be sure, but a wise one. At least that's what I thought until "Saturday Night Live" aired a popular skit about a couple named Doug and Wendy WHINE-er. They would speak, of course, in grating, whining voices that my classmates parroted whenever they pronounced my last name, which was often. Those were difficult years.
Later in life, I tried to embrace my Weiner-ness. As a correspondent for NPR, I signed off by pronouncing my last name strongly and proudly, unlike some broadcast personalities who change their names to something more anodyne. (Can you hear me, Jon Stewart?) I wrote a book about happiness, riffing off the irony that my last name is pronounced WHINE-er. Yes, I thought I had managed to make the best of the hand that God — and my grandfather — had dealt me.
Then this. How could you, Anthony? And why wasn't I — indeed, why weren't Weiners everywhere — listed among those whom you hurt? I mean, you seemed to cover most of the free world. Would it have killed you to throw your namesakes in there, too?
With all due respect to Shakespeare, a rose by any other name just isn't the same. We look in the mirror and see not a generic person but a very specific one. We see Ted, and Sarah, and José, and yes, sometimes we see a Weiner. Names don't merely describe. They invest meaning. The river of semantics flows in both directions. Call someone a nincompoop often enough and long enough and they start to believe it. There is no such thing as "mere semantics." Names matter.
Some friends suggest that "Weinergate" is good for me and my writing career. I'm not so sure. Indeed, I believe it's time we re-think that old saw about there being no such thing as bad publicity. I suspect Anthony would agree. No, Weinergate is not good for us Weiners any more than Watergate was good for water.
So, I have a request of the media: enough with the puns. Enough of the "Weiner wrap" to describe your team coverage of the scandal. Enough of the "Weiner probes" and the "stiff criticism" and, yes (I'm talking to you, Daily Beast), enough of "Weiner's Junk Defense." This man's name — my name! — is not license to regress to 7th grade. So, with all due respect, members of the media everywhere: please give the Weiner jokes a break. They give people like me a bad name. And names matter.
Eric Weiner is the author of "Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine," to be published in December.
More from The New York Times:
Maureen Dowd: Your tweetin' heart
Editorial: 'I don't know what I was thinking'
Letters: The secret online life of Rep. Weiner
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