Writer Thomas Dai talks about the many places baked into his name, an infamous instance of literary yellowface, and how labels can create structure in our lives. You can find more of Thomas's work on his website, thomasndai.com. You can find us on Instagram @namedroppingpod or send us an email at namedropping@defector.com. Namedropping is hosted by Giri Nathan and Samer Kalaf, and produced by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. Our editor is Justin Ellis, and our supervising producer is Alex Sujong Laughlin. Our production assistant is Jae Towle Vieira. Defector Media is a collectively owned, subscriber-based media company. If you love this podcast and want to support us, subscribe at defector.com.
Writer Thomas Dai talks about the many places baked into his name, an infamous instance of literary yellowface, and how labels can create structure in our lives. Episode transcript available here.
You can find more of Thomas's work on his website, thomasndai.com. You can find us on Instagram @namedroppingpod or send us an email at namedropping@defector.com.
Namedropping is hosted by Giri Nathan and Samer Kalaf, and produced by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. Our editor is Justin Ellis, and our supervising producer is Alex Sujong Laughlin. Our production assistant is Jae Towle Vieira.
Defector Media is a collectively owned, subscriber-based media company. If you love this podcast and want to support us, subscribe at defector.com.
Thomas Dai: It's sort of this like running on a treadmill kind of experience of like wanting your name to like somehow reflect not just who you are, but like kind of your background and your family's background. But like that's kind of an impossible ask of like three or four syllables or however long your name is, right?
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Giri Nathan: I'm Giri Nathan.
Samer Kalaf: And I'm Samer Kalaf.
Giri: And this is Namedropping, the show about being named for a place you no longer live in.
Samer: In this episode, we talked to Thomas Dai
Giri: Thomas is a friend of our production assistant, Jae, and they were in a creative writing class together.
Samer: Jae sent us an essay that Thomas had published in Guernica about his name, called “Take My Name And Say It Slow.”
Giri: He tells us that his goal in the essay was to demystify and make transparent all the layers of his name, both Western and Chinese.
Samer: For himself, it was also chronicling the discovery of how he found out about his own name through his parents.
Giri: Yeah, Thomas did a really nice job in the essay of explaining this feeling of destiny or predetermination, based on the meanings of your name and investigating your name, as he says late in the game.
Samer: Yeah. And as Thomas gets into it, his name kind of represents a lot about where he grew up and where his family
Giri: Thomas got us thinking about how an author's name influences how we read their work. And some of the tricky implications that that has for us as readers.
Samer: We talked about discovering new meanings of your name, and deciding which ones are most important to you.
[music fades]
Thomas: My name is Thomas Dai, that's my English name. In Chinese my parents named me Dai Nuocheng. Dai is my family's surname, which usually comes before Chinese names, Nuocheng is—I guess you would say my given name in Chinese. And it literally could be translated as Knoxville, which is also the city in Tennessee where I was born. Cheng in Chinese—not the cheng of my name, but cheng oftentimes refers to a city, a chéngshì. And Nuo comes from Nuokeshiweier, which is this sort of pinyin form of Knoxville, it's how Knoxville has been turned into Chinese. And so that is, I guess, the main origin point of the name is Knoxville, where I was born. But my mother is from a city in China called Chengdu. And that also is the second part of the name. So there's kind of two cities, one American, one Chinese, baked into the nomenclature there.
Giri: In your work, you write really beautifully and with a lot of detail about parts of your life and parts of your naming that you obviously weren't there to witness yourself. So I was wondering how big a role the stories played in your childhood? Or when did you find out kind of the logic behind your own name?
Thomas: I think I found out rather late. I think this happens a lot with me in writing in that there will be certain things that maybe are kind of unconscious or like that you're subliminally aware of. It wasn't like my parents were hiding any of these stories from me. But I guess the simple way to say it is my parents weren't also the type to hold forth a lot about why they named us or even about family history in any way. And so these are things that I had also never asked them when I was a kid. But when it came time to write this essay, it was like this sort of thought that was always in the back of my mind, about kind of knowing a bit about my Chinese name, but not really knowing any like, I wouldn't say like hard facts or anything about it. And so the title of us is “Take My Name And Say It Slow.” The idea for the essay really began in a class I was taking, where we were asked to pick two things in your life that are opposed and analyze that opposition in a way. And so the two things that I chose were my Chinese name and my English name. And I think that was meaningful to me too, because in many ways, I think Asian names in particular, are opaque in the American cultural context or kind of create this sense of illegibility. And so part of the essay’s motivation and aim was to try and demystify and make kind of transparent, at least in my own personal case, the many kinds of stories and layers behind my Chinese name. In writing the essay and sort of working on that curiosity have led me to ask my parents more directly, specifically my mom more directly about how the name came to be. And so, yeah, I wouldn't say it was like a family story, or something I was always just like, fixated on. It kind of came out of the writing itself. And yet, in a strange way, then also felt more—I don't know there's this, like when, when it's like something you're not actively looking for, that you've been told, but that you find out about, in retrospect, at least for me, it like gives it this weird, like hokey air of like, destiny in some way. [laughs] That then I feel weird about, but then, I think, made it personally affecting for me, like, you know, it's a name I've been carrying around for so long. And then to find out about it kind of late in the game after like, 20 plus years of carrying it around, I think was really meaningful, in a sense, and then helped me write that essay in more than just like a fact finding, let me tell this story kind of way. But it came to have, I think, more emotional resonance in that sense.
Giri: Did you want to tell us where Thomas came from?
Thomas: Yeah. The Thomas part, I think, was chosen by my parents. But in a way it was chosen by the doctor who delivered me, in that I think my parents were just, you know, wondering about English names, and I think less familiar with what English naming conventions are or should be. And so they asked the doctor, and so the doctor basically drew from personal life, just went to his family and said, you know, I have one son named Jim. And then the younger son was named Thomas, or the second son was named Thomas. And my mother at the time, knew a Jim as in like, the director of her lab, and kind of her boss in academia was named that. And so it would seem maybe a little too on the nose to name me that as well. So she decided to go with Tom and Thomas. And also I think that they, they were aware enough of certain elements of American culture, to know that that was like a safe or like, standard name. It wasn't a weird name. It was a name they'd heard of, it was a name that like, certain, you know, like, famous people and characters they knew of whether it was like, think like Thomas Edison, I would imagine would be someone they knew of, also Tom Sawyer as like this big kind of well known literary intrepid child figure. So yeah, I think that Thomas felt like a safe choice to them. But they came to that choice very much via the doctor, and kind of just this coincidence.
Giri: Yeah. And you use Tom Sawyer as a framing device in your essay, as well as wondering like, what your relationship is with that character, or whether you that ever had any resonance for you.
Thomas: My relationship to Tom Sawyer is pretty glancing. I think that's sort of a theme going throughout this sort of paradox where like, with names where like, it can feel like this really arbitrary or kind of like surface level superficial attachment. But then if you poke at it, or maybe because of the nature of what names are, they also feel super primary in a way. And so I do feel very connected to Tom Sawyer in in the sense that we share this name, but I guess I wouldn't say he's like one of my favorite characters. Like I did read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer when I was in, I think, middle school, but it didn't really make a big impact on me as a story. Something that did make an impact on me, though, was specifically that scene that I kind of excerpt from the book as the epigraph where Tom is like whitewashing the fence, and then there's a friend who like wants to whitewash the fence with him. And I think the whitewashing of the fence there, I think becomes a reflection on like the taking on of Thomas as a very just standard way of whitewashing Chinese or Asian American names slash life. I think a lot of Asian Americans, I wouldn't call it appropriation necessarily, but it is taking on of a name for certain utilitarian reason, right or this name is like given to them for that reason, like to my parents, it would make me legible it would make things safer and easier. And then you know, the boy who ends up wanting to whitewash the fence, at least in the cultural context of America is is that Yi-Fen Chou figure who also wants to do this painting over of themselves, though not with white for like, seemingly much more niche or obscure reason of like trying to get a poem published, right?
Samer: Could you explain a little bit about this poet who took a Chinese name and wrote something under it?
Thomas: Yeah. So I think back in 2015, was when this happened. And it was a fairly big deal in the literary community, maybe less of a big deal outside of that. But there is this poet, Michael Derrick Hudson, who wound up in a prestigious anthology of poetry, the Best American poetry volume for that year. And his poem had been picked by a Native American writer named Sherman Alexie. And the poem had really nothing to do with anything identifiably Asian. And actually, that became one of the reasons why Alexie later said he liked the poem, because the poem was really kind of celebratory of like, the imagery is all kind of Greek and classical, in a way. And so the editor said that he was really intrigued by the idea of an Asian American author, because this poem was published under not Michael Derrick Hudson's real name, but under the name, Yi-Fen Chou, which actually belonged to a Chinese woman who went to high school with. And so he published the poem under the name Yi-Fen Chou, it ended up in being selected as one of the best American poems of the year. And then the editor when it came out that Yi-Fen Chou was actually a white man, whose legal name was Michael Derrick Hudson, Alexie, decided, and I think it's sort of complicated, why or why not, but he decided to keep the poem in there, because he didn't want to invalidate the poem itself as separate from the writer. And he also pointed out that his interest in the poem, though, was sparked by the fact that there was an assumed Asian author, but it wasn't about Asian content. And that was interesting to him. And so I think that this then became like a huge controversy, and then also like drummed up sort of other historical resonances, other times of people, not necessarily just writers, but, you know, different actors playing Asian roles, or Asian characters and films, white actors playing Asian characters in films, you know, the Scarlett Johansson kind of effect. And so there's so many different layers to it, right? In this case, it was just a name. But in a literary context, like your name sort of is like the thing that's there that, that the reader attaches a sort of human body to in their mind, and race as part of that body in this weird way. So I think that that instance interested me because it all hinged on this name. But it felt different too from some of the broader conversations about cultural appropriation, which are so much more visible in many ways, and I think, bring up different dynamics and different questions.
Giri: Yeah, I found like a really interesting wrinkle to this story was, it seems like Alexie responded to that in a way that was like, even beyond what Hudson's initial gambit like might have been in the first place. Like maybe he just wanted that name to get his foot in the door, and maybe a little extra time spent on his submission, but it seemed like the disjoint between the name and the content of the poem was actually, like, pretty fascinating for Alexie and like, maybe Hudson succeeded, in some cynical way beyond what even expected to, and that got me thinking a lot about my own habits, or like, the ways that kind of subconscious expectations frame your actual act of reading.
Thomas: Yeah, I think it is really fascinating, because in a way, the editor is sort of pulling back the curtains there and saying, I chose this poem, not because of just the Asian name for like, quote, unquote, like diversity quota, or something like that, or because of the poem itself independent of the name, but because of this weird kind of chimeric coming together of the two
Giri: Yeah
Thomas: where it's like, the Asian name, and all this sort of assumed baggage that goes with that. And the fact that the poem itself, though, doesn't have anything legibly Asian about it. And so in a way, I think what's being celebrated is a kind of aesthetic that is not like legibly ethnic, but still like has this ethnic frame around it. And I find that fascinating because I think a lot of ethnic writers are really—they try in subtle or sometimes less subtle ways to resist a reading in which their work is only ever a kind of like encyclopedic or anthropological account of what it means to be Asian or Black, or Native, etc. Right. And so the double irony to that there is that, in a way you can sort of see into Alexie is like a Native writer’s mindset and maybe how in picking these poems, he was reflecting on the ways that he himself and I'm not someone who knows much about Alexie’s work, but I would assume presumably, that part of that response to this poem came out of his own maybe frustrations of being pigeon holed as a Native writer and wanting to write in different ways, but not have to give up his identity, right?
Giri: Yeah, I'm reminded of like, I think I remember novelist Kazuo Ishiguro talking about, like, always being complimented by critics for like, the essential Japaneseness for his novels, but like, he's like, I just read extremely British books. I'm very British.
Samer: To turn this on to you, Thomas. Have you ever had a situation where your name seemed like it impacted the way your work was read?
Thomas: Hmm. I think it's hard to say. I mean, first and foremost, because I'm so early on, like, I haven't even published a first book or anything like that. And so in this sort of publishing or literary sense, I don't know if I've been misread in that way. I think that sometimes I wonder if it's just like a paranoia that I have. And I think like a justifiable paranoia, but one that like, ends up coming out on the page where I do encounter these moments where I wonder, okay, I write creative nonfiction I write about the self, why is it that I seem so averse to writing directly about certain themes like Chinese food as just like a bad cliche example or, or like, kind of homecoming journeys to the motherland or the difficulties of language, I mean, I have written about all these things, actually, is the irony, but it always like gets my hackles up when I kind of come to the page. Because I do wonder sometimes if like, that's an expectation of, then I'm just falling into expectations. At the same time, I think that this goes back to the fact that I write under my English name, like my last name is not a Xu, it's not a Chang. It's not like one of these Chinese last names that I think are immediately read by white Americans or even other Asian Americans as Chinese or as Asian. And so I think in some ways, I it's not that I've been let off the hook. But I think I don't have to think about it as much as my name kind of is obscure. It's not like a very common Chinese last name. But it's something that I think about less so in like how I read and more so in how I write, like, I am thinking all the time about the certain expectations that a reader might have of me as an Asian American writer, and I guess the most immediate way that someone gets the sense that this person is an Asian American writer is by their name.
Samer: Yeah, I kind of wonder, I don't know if you think about it, you kind of wonder what people think of it my name when they read it, because I, I relate to what you said about when you're trying to write about your own heritage or culture, I feel like it's like an expectation thing. It's also like a perfectionist thing where you want to be like I'm gonna do the perfect representation for all of these… and it's just impossible to do and that's why I kind of shy away from it sometimes.
Giri: Funny because I think I also have a name that doesn't necessarily tell you what my background is right off the off the top but it just poses more straightforward like logistical problems to people where people like chunk it as “girl” a lot I remember when I was first writing for Deadspin, those like people very, didn't even like read it as a name in the first place. And then a lot of people assume Nathan's my first name in a lot of contexts. So I think it's, it's just generally disorienting and I like I don't even have that fun ethnic frame to play with. [laughs]
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Giri: But I also wanted to take a step back to your essay. And there's kind of these glancing moments where you talk about how different people in your life address you. And, you know, a teacher refers to you as Tommy Day, I think maybe when you're early days of school, and then you have a, an early friend who basically, like remixes a common Asian slur, as as your day to day nickname.
Thomas: Makes it cute, though. It's like, sort of like that tiny version of it or whatever.
Giri: Right, right, right. Yeah, do you want to talk about that experience, and like, how you thought about it at the time versus how you kind of digest it looking back?
Thomas: I think with a particular experience of like, you know, being called a racial epithet, but one that in the American context, I think, at least where I grew up, I mean, it's weird to say this, because now I do think of that word as a slur. But I think being called Chinky in the south, at the time that I grew up, it was all about tone, in a weird way, like the word itself, kind of didn't matter. Like, I think I knew that it had something to do with my race, obviously. And that usually was not a nice word. But I think what I'm trying to get across in the essay is that so much of it had to do with the person calling me that name. As in it was someone who was really close to me, someone who is one of my best friends, and and who I don't like harbor weirdly, like any kind of intense, retroactive hatred for, you know? Like, we're not friends any longer, as I sort of talked about in the essay, but I've I tried to make it clear that this sort of point of bifurcation between me and this person who I think to someone who, you know, doesn't have the context of the essay would just see is like, the white racist sort of aggravator or antagonist is that, I think it was like, I changed, like, eventually, it became really uncomfortable to answer to that name, even when that name was said in like a tone of like—I guess loving racism is like, the best way of saying it. And then also, I think, when you take a step back, as I did in writing that essay, it's hard to distinguish those experiences from like, I guess, generalized experiences of name calling among like teenagers, like, I think it's just hard sometimes to determine, like, everyone is sort of giving everyone a nickname. And yes, lo and behold, most of the ones given to kids of color are vaguely racist ones, by teenagers, at least. But when you're in that social environment, these are your friends, like, these are the people who like, determine whether or not you're going to sit alone at lunch or not. And these are people that you spend a lot of your time with. And so I think it's always just more complicated than like, there is a kind of group of people that can be, you know, troped as bullies who are coming in and saying these racist things and, and applying these racist names, like, I think that actually, some of the people who make you first realize your race in that really like stark way are people you really love, right?
Samer: Yeah.
Thomas: And I don't think that that's an excuse. Like, I don't think people should be excused just because you also love them and spend a lot of time with them. But it makes them more complicated, because you also just have a lot of good feelings for those people as well.
Samer: Yeah, that part of the essay really struck me because I didn't have the same exact experience as you obviously. But I felt like I could relate to that. There's like a desperation in adolescence or high school where you just don't want to be invisible. And I thought you illustrated that really well in the essay. But yeah, I don't know if that fear of invisibility will ever necessarily go away. I don't know if kids these days feel that as strongly, I assume so. But it's just kind of, I guess, contorted or involved in different ways, possibly.
Thomas: Mm.
Giri: Yeah, I'm thinking about that. I feel like probably probably still depends a lot on where you grew up. But that feeling of differences, perhaps like, not as alienating now. I would hope it maybe is. Maybe a little empowering.
Thomas: Yeah. I think that sort of urge to kind of categorize people racially or otherwise is always there I think for teens are for anyone really, but but that may be when you're young people are less hesitant to like voice it or just like go there and say it. But I do feel like maybe today people, it's not even just like a thing about like kids being more politically correct or something like that. I feel like the urge will always be there. But maybe there's like, this is maybe one of the underlying hopes of this essay in general, it's just kind of like, call me a racist name of you want, but like, be creative about it or like, like, like, don't just pick the most like, obvious one, right? Like these, like, there has to be some kind of like, and the same thing goes for that white poet who just took the name, like, you know, think about what Chinese name you would like to appropriate! You know, it's sort of like, it's not that I think, like more nuanced racism is like, better than un-nuanced racism. But I think in a way, actually, if people stop and think about the nuances, it's sort of it draw their mind to the absurdity of like this sort of brutishness of just naming something a racial epithet and then moving on.
Giri: Yeah. I wanted to go back a little bit to kind of the theme of geography and place in your work. And one thing I really liked about reading it is that we get to travel alongside with you. So I had a really kind of straightforward, like, question of how do you find yourself introducing yourself in these different places in different contexts?
Thomas: Yeah, I think that there's a degree of continuity. I always introduce myself as Thomas, I feel uncomfortable even in China, introducing myself as Dai Nuocheng, my Chinese name. Part of that is like a fear of like, my sloppy language skills. And I think part of that is too just a feeling that I think in China, I'm automatically read as someone who's not from there either. Like there's certain tells, mostly linguistic ones, like when I speak Chinese, or when people see me speaking English, right? Like, there's a clear sense of me is like, probably being Asian American, or Hawaii, like overseas Chinese in some way. And so I think, because that's clear, I almost always just introduce myself as Thomas still, even to my family. I mean, my family tends to even though they speak to me in Chinese, they refer to me as Tommy or Thomas, I think in these different contexts, there is like a degree of code switching that happens, but maybe it's more about, like, queerness than my race in some ways. Like, I think in China, I'm much less likely to—it's not like I can turn the gay off in my voice or something. But I, there's certain elements of like, my life that I just don't talk about as much like my partner, I refer to my partner as—or I kind of try not to refer to them, which I know is kind of complicated, and not the best. But it's just those are conversations that I'm less comfortable having with strangers in China because I don't really know, it's not that I assume that they're going to be homophobic. I mean, China actually is not in the urban spaces in China I've been to are oftentimes queer, friendly, and do have like queer spaces, but I have certain concerns. It's like my language skills again, like, there's just like, parts of those conversations about personal life and such that I, that I don't know how to have, because I don't have a language for it outside of English. I don't know if that answers your question really well, though?
Giri: No, yeah, definitely. Yeah. So you have an undergraduate degree in evolutionary biology, and you got an MFA after now, you're working in American Studies. But I wanted to go back to that first phase of your studies and just talk a little bit about your early experience with like taxonomy, and the practice of attaching names to all the parts of the natural world. And I was wondering how that informed your thinking about names, or maybe even the writing of this essay.
Thomas: I think that definitely did influence this essay, both in a direct kind of personal way, in that I'm reflecting on my parents as scientists and my mother in particular. And so in the essay, I talk a bit about chemical nomenclature and how different molecules are named and how my mom was working on a particular molecule, and how in chemical sort of names, they're all very specific, like they, their prefixes and suffixes are set up in a way so that the name refers to like a certain orientation or number of carbon molecules, or whatever it is, right? And so I think something about scientific naming, and in my experience, that's mostly like binomial nomenclature, like kind of how we named species in Latin terms. There's such a like, there's a formula, I guess, is a better way to say it, right? Like, there's this sense of a rhyme and reason and if you think about that rhyme and reason too much, you realize that it still is just a bunch of scientists deciding kind of arbitrarily what to name something. But it has this kind of veneer of like, it's been thought through, it's serious. There's a sort of like system for doing it, right, like, but I think in writing this essay, I was sort of thinking about how there's certain ways of naming things that feel really solid. And I was kind of doing the opposite. Like, I was looking at these rather arbitrary names, these names that were taken and imposed or, and sort of reading them in a very serious way, like going through all of their different layers of meaning. I think with the scientific naming system, it's like, in a way, this really reflects me back to your question about place and space in a way. I mean, for a phase of my life, and I would say, especially the college years, but also earlier, I found a lot of joy in just like, collecting names of things. And I think that evolutionary biology studying that was part of that impulse, like, you're just learning a lot of species names, and then kind of memorizing them. And in a way with geography and place, as a kid, I did the same thing. Like I memorized all the names of all the capitals in the world. And I think in some sense, there's this like, idea of order that you get when you just know all the names for things, even for places that you've never been, but that you feel like there's this sense of solidity, and that you've just figured it out, like you have the map, or you have this sort of format for like, when you see an animal like you can name it to yourself. And I think in a kind of way, like in thinking about my own name, though, and writing about it, I just realized how kind of surface level that knowledge always is, like, you could have the name, but if you don't know the stories behind it, if you haven't really inhabited that place, if you haven't really like spent time with that creature, in a, you know, more than abstract way, it really is just a name to you. And that sense of order that you get from like, knowing all of them is kind of fake
Giri: It almost like wraps back around in a way where you feel like these scientific names are somehow delivered from above, then you realize how socially contingent they are. And then maybe they even are just named after the scientist who discovered the creature. So you get like, it kind of comes full circle in terms of just like the arbitrary arbitrariness of it.
Thomas: Yeah, and they too change as well, I did something I realized, like, you sort of think anything to do with, like, natural history, you know, in that Darwinian sense is like written in stone, in some way. But I think that one thing I learned from even just like my short time, you know, cosplaying as like a evolutionary biologist, was that their names—like that's one of the major points of contention and study is like, deciding whether or not to split a species into two, and then it gets a new name, or deciding actually, these two groups form one group. So there really is just one name for it. And that other name is old. And we're going to throw that out now. So—and I think sort of drawing that back to the essay, it's sort of this like, running on a treadmill kind of experience of like wanting your name, to somehow catch up to your experiences, or wanting your name to like, somehow reflect the full sort of complexity or profundity of like, not just who you are, but like kind of your background and your family's background. But like, that's kind of an impossible ask, have like, three or four syllables, or however long your name is right.
Samer: I just had a more kind of technical question about your work. Do you have any particular process for choosing titles for your work?
Thomas: No
Samer and Giri: [laughing]
Thomas: I would say I kind of like to let other people name things. I mean, relating back to my mother and how she just kind of let the doctor named me like, maybe it's sort of my process as well. I mean, even this essay about names, I really wasn't very particular about the title. And then one of my professors in my MFA was just like, I think that this little phrase of the end works as the name. I think that that sort of is kind of how I like to work in a broader process sense too is to like, I let the name appear and then kind of retroactively try and create the meaning there—that sounds super new agey, but it's very unintentional how I work, and, and so titles are something that I really wait till the end to see. Like usually looking at the text itself, like what works as a title. The one exception I would say to that is that there is a series of essays in the book that I'm currently completing, where each one is kind of arranged around a certain geographical activity. So there's one called “Running Days”, and there's one called “Driving Days.” And then there's one called “Falling Days.” And, and so for instance, that essay, each part of the essay is also named as a geographic name, followed by a little story about that place. And that place is always somewhere where I jumped or I fell, or something of gravity taking its revenge on the kind of nature happened. And with the “Running Days” essay, it's all these different places I ran. And so I guess if there is any process with the work I've done, thus far, I am really I like how geographic names, including my own geographic name, can kind of create a structure for narratives. And so the titles of those essays really did, I guess, reference that specifically in a way,
Samer: I can see a kind of freedom coming from just letting people other people name.
Giri: Yeah. See, that's why that's why I always file posts to you without headlines, yeah. That's what I'm waiting for.
Samer: Yeah.
Giri: Who do you think is more particular about names? Writers are biologists?
Thomas: I think biologists, I think that they actually get into spats about names. And I think that they also think the stakes are different, right? Like, I mean, you could even think of like, the different sorts of arguments for naming the different strains of COVID. Right? Like, they're just back and forth, kind of thinking about the potential ways that it can be read. At the same time, I think, like writers are really particular but it's sort of like personal. Like, I think that like all writers are really particular about their titles. But at least for me, I think I'm a little aware that like, what I'm picking as a title or what emerges for me, as I just said, as the title, is sort of very for me, like that kind of reasoning behind it, oftentimes, and I don't know, I like that too. Like just kind of ceding a bit of control of it and, and realizing that it's like it's, it's not, it's not always the most important thing, like the title or the name really isn't always the most important thing. And then I think in the context of like biologists and scientists, it is very different because I think that they some of the things that they're trying to communicate about some of their more important, but there's, there's like an immediate kind of cliff you could fall off of if you name something really incorrectly.
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Samer: Thanks for listening to Namedropping. You can find more of Thomas's work on his website, thomasndai.com. You can find us on Instagram @namedroppingpod or send us an email at namedropping@defector.com. Namedropping is hosted by me, Samer Kalaf, and Giri Nathan, and produced by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. Our editor is Justin Ellis, and our supervising producer is Alex Sujong Laughlin. Our production assistant is Jae Towle Vieira. Thanks to editor in chief Tom Ley and the rest of the Defector staff. Defector Media is a collectively-owned subscriber-based media company. If you love this podcast and wants to support us, subscribe at Defector.com.