Dahleen Glanton: A member of Congress called out a colleague for saying her name wrong. As a Dahleen, I can relate

I am Dahleen. It’s pronounced Dahl-lean. But you can call me Darlene, Dah-lean, Doll-lean, Day-lean or, as howtopronounce.com says, Dalen.

When you have an unusual name, you have to learn how to go with the flow. Few people will say it correctly. Sometimes, even family members and close friends don’t get it right.

To me, it’s no big deal when someone butchers my name, but it clearly bothers Rep. Pramila Jayapal. Her difficult first and last names are a double whammy.

For reasons much more complex than the simple, inadvertent mispronunciation of someone’s name, Jayapal was right to speak up when Rep. Debbie Lesko repeatedly mispronounced her name during televised congressional hearing Tuesday.

It’s one thing when someone slips up and makes a mistake, but quite another when a colleague you see every day makes no attempt to get your name right.

The Democratic representative from Washington state got enough of the Arizona Republican mispronouncing her name during a heated House Judiciary Committee hearing and called her out.

Lesko called her Rep. JAY-a-pol — twice. The second time, Jayapal interrupted her and said, “JY-ah-pall. If you are going to say my name, please say it right. It’s JY-ah-pall.”

Jayapal, a naturalized citizen who is of Indian descent, previously had warned that she was “starting to lose my temper” with Attorney General William Barr, who tried to evade her questions about the use of federal forces against protesters in Seattle and other cities.

By the time Lesko took the microphone to challenge Jayapal’s assertions about the takeover of the autonomous protest zone in Seattle, she’d had enough.

Clearly, a lot of this was political. But Jayapal made a very strong unspoken point.

Sometimes people mispronounce someone’s name in an attempt to dismiss what they’re saying. It’s a microaggression that says, “You’re not even important enough for me to figure out how to say your name properly.”

That would anger me too. The women have served together on the 41-member Judiciary Committee for nearly two years. Lesko clearly had enough time to find out the correct pronunciation of her colleague’s name if she’d wanted to.

This is a lot deeper than I initially intended to go with this column, so let’s get back to me.

I am named after the 1950s actress Arlene Dahl. She was somewhat of a glamour girl in her day, with her flaming red hair and ruby lipstick. She’s still living, dividing her time between New York City and West Palm Beach, Florida. She’ll turn 95 next month.

Her son, Lorenzo Lamas, is best known for playing the irresponsible grandson of the family matriarch in the 1980s nighttime soap opera “Falcon Crest.” I never missed an episode, but I still haven’t seen a single one of Dahl’s films.

I have no idea what prompted my mother to create Dahleen by using Dahl’s last name and adding the unique “leen” to the end. I presume that she had seen Dahl’s name on a movie marquee and fell in love with it.

Dahl and my mother had absolutely nothing in common. But as it turned out, Dahl and I would eventually end up on similar paths. After leaving Hollywood in 1959, she worked for 20 years as a Chicago Tribune columnist, writing about beauty.

I’ve been called Dahleen since childhood, but it isn’t my first name. It’s Angela. For years, I thought I was the only Dahleen in the world, and I loved being special. Then Facebook came on the scene and Dahleen Roberts Kendler sent me a friend request.

I was shocked and disappointed that someone had stolen my one-of-a-kind identity. Later, I learned that she was named after the Dahlberg radio that was produced in the 1950s. She eventually introduced me to her friend, Dahleen Bonner.

That’s as far as I’ve gotten in the Dahleen name club.

For the most part, the experiences with my name have been positive. However, there was that one time when the city editor at the Houston Post forced me to use Angela in my byline because he thought Dahleen was too complicated for readers.

That was early in my career as a journalist, and I was too green to realize that he was demeaning me. So I let him get away with the microaggression, and to this day, I regret it.

I get emails addressed to Darlene all the time, and it has never been an issue.

Going by a middle name, though, does have a unique set of challenges, regardless of what it is. You have to use your first name on official documents, but it’s OK to use your middle name on everything else. It can get confusing.

The biggest issue I’ve encountered was at Midway Airport a few years ago. A ticket agent refused to allow me through the gate because Dahleen was on my airline ticket and Angela was on my identification. I missed that flight.

But there’s something nice about having an unusual name that people with the most common names such as Linda, Mary and Patricia, which is my deceased older sister’s name, never experience. That’s individuality.

Plus, it’s always a great icebreaker in conversation. The first question people often ask when they meet me is, “Where did that name come from?” The second is, “How do you spell it?” And then, “How do you pronounce it, again?”

I say, “Dahl-lean.” And nearly every time, they repeat it back to me wrong.

It would have been much easier for me if my mother had chosen Dahl’s middle name, which is Carol. I’d get to walk into a store and buy a bottle of Coke with my name printed on it, but I never would have experienced the joy of being different.

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ABOUT THE WRITER

Dahleen Glanton is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.

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