Names matter. Yes, the world seems in a hurry, and it seems easy to pronounce a name any which way. But how someone pronounces a name matters. It matters to the person with the name, and so it should matter to us.
“My name is Turkish and it means ‘ear of wheat.’ It is part of who I am,” says Başak Çoruh, MD, [Bah-SHOCK Cha-ROO], associate professor of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine here at the University of Washington School of Medicine.
A story from our Department of Medicine talks about how physicians feel about their names. They talk about what it means to them when you show respect to try to say a name correctly.
“The first step in creating an inclusive workplace culture is learning your colleagues’ names.”