simont | The thing is, Fred…

I've been idly wondering for a while about the circumstances under which people use other people's names while talking to them.

My personal idiolect almost doesn't contain the concept. I just don't ever find it natural or instinctive to randomly drop somebody's name into the middle of a sentence addressed to them. ‘Yes, Joe, but you haven't considered…’. I'll use somebody's name at the start of a sentence to get their attention, if I think they don't already know I'm talking to them (e.g. in a large group), but the only circumstance I can think of under which I'll use it later in the sentence is if I realise half way through the sentence that the person I'm aiming it at isn't listening (i.e. I should have used it at the start of the sentence but neglected to).

Other people I know will do it slightly more often than I do, but still not very often; it doesn't seem common in general. It slightly surprises me to hear my name used in this way by someone talking to me in person, and it definitely surprises me when someone goes to the effort of writing it in an email to me, where there's absolutely no possibility of me suddenly assuming they're talking to somebody else.

Yet it's much more common in fiction: I often notice it in dialogue in books, and its high frequency there seems faintly unrealistic to me. Presumably it doesn't seem that way to the authors, and presumably that's because in their idiolect it's perfectly normal. (Either that or there's a widespread convention of doing it in written fiction specifically, perhaps for some practical reason such as making sure the reader doesn't lose track of which side of a long dialogue is which. This is an interesting theory but doesn't seem particularly likely to me.)

I worked with a guy some years back who had the interesting habit of only using your name in this way if you were annoying him. For a while I thought this might be deliberate (a subtle signal to back off or re-evaluate your behaviour), but now I have a different theory, which is that it's completely unconscious and has to do with what he's concentrating on. As long as you're arguing with this guy over (say) a technical issue, he's just thinking about the issue itself and all his statements are focused on it. Even if you disagree with him, as long as you're doing it by making intelligent statements about the topic of conversation, he can remain focused on that topic. But if you stop making sense, or display evidence of a clear misunderstanding, or reopen points he thought had been settled, or otherwise cease to argue intelligently, then he has to start thinking about you rather than the issue, because he needs to try to imagine what's in your mind in order to figure out what it is you've misunderstood or forgotten. And at that point, your name starts to show up in his speech simply as a reflection of the fact that it's having to show up in the forefront of his mind.

So that suggests the hypothesis that there might be a correlation between whether your idiolect has this feature and what sort of thing you like to think about. I probably hang around with people who have an above-average tendency to concentrate hard on things, either physical objects or abstract mathematical concepts, and one might reasonably argue that an author had an above-average tendency to concentrate on people due to the need to invent characters, think hard about their personalities and write about them all the time.

I'm unconvinced by that, though; it's a huge sweeping generalisation and probably completely wrong, and also it doesn't seem to fit with my feeling about why I don't use people's names when talking to them. You see, when I was a small boy I was unwilling to use people's names at all, even to get their attention, out of an irrational fear of getting the wrong name and looking like an idiot. (There was a specific incident that might have helped to give rise to this fear: a girl on whom I had a severe crush was apparently introduced to me under two different names by different people, presumably because I wasn't listening properly to one of them. Until I figured out which was her real name, I was unwilling to use either one, and reasonably so!) And I'd be more inclined to blame that known tendency of me for the nature of my own idiolect than any sweeping generalisation about geeks, but on the other hand that only applies to me and doesn't explain the general tendency I (think I) see around me.

Another possibility is that it isn't just the colleague I mention above: perhaps the use of somebody's name often occurs as a more general signal that they're exasperating you or being slow in some fashion. Given that a common reason for calling somebody by name is to get their attention in the first place (as I mention above), perhaps the re-use of the name in the middle of a conversation functions as a vague hint that they still ought to be paying more attention in some fashion. A brief thought experiment suggests to me that if I were to see (in writing) someone answering a question by saying ‘It's forty-two, Bob’, that would strike me as slightly hostile or mocking or indicative that Bob really should have known or worked out the answer for himself, and I'd imagine a slightly sarcastic tone of voice, whereas ‘It's forty-two’ feels purely factual. But then, that doesn't seem to fit with all the usages I encounter either.

So I'm stumped. Am I in fact wrong in thinking that my friends use this linguistic construction less often than other people, and in particular less often than characters in fiction? Does either of my half-baked hypotheses make any sense at all? If not, is there a better one?

The thing is, Fred…

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