The mountain will come to Muhammad. That’s what UK parents with daughters named Alexa are insisting on as a solution to the ridicule their children are receiving from peers because their name is the same as Amazon’s smart speaker assistant. One girl went so far as to have her name changed legally.
The BBC reports:
The word Alexa has become increasingly common in recent years as more households use voice-activated smart speakers. Amazon’s Echo and Echo Dot use Alexa as the command you say before giving it instructions or asking a question.
However, this is causing problems for people named Alexa, who are frequently on the receiving end of repeated jokes, where people shout their name and issue a command.
As someone who spent much of his life to date being asked “What’s your complaint?” when revealing my last night, I can sympathize. But that’s as far as I would go. I never thought of writing Phillip Roth or his publisher demanding that the name of his Pulitzer-prize winning novel — whose main character, n.b., had sex with a slab or beef liver — be changed.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
The book’s title was my and my family’s cross to bear for a good many years, which we did did without wincing (well, sometimes we winced) nor crying aloud.
My best advice for these parents is to advise their daughters to do learn constructive ways of dealing with the issue. Elsewise, they can look forward to suffering the fate all snowflakes suffer. It is the nature of children to tease each other based on their name or some noticeable trait or feature. To demand the world change to spare their daughters’ hurt feelings is to set a bad and unrealistic example.
I just hope for the sake of the child who legally changed her name is that her new name is not “Karen.”
