Superflous use of others' names

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This is a reply originally on another thread, but it evidently offended a name abuser who thus flagged the reply for spam or who knows what. However I think the content is quite useful regarding a problem many identified on that thread, so my response to the reply's disappearance is to post it as a new thread. As folks will see there is nothing spammy about the content. It is however, hard-hitting criticism against many people in society who engage in the practice described.

Here was the reply:

Any use of your name when it's already clear that you are the one being spoken to is superfluous and unnecessary. Even if only once.

People who do this may attempt to justify this irritating practice by claiming it helps them remember peoples' names, or that it sounds 'intimate' to the person being spoken to, etc. Someone above quoted Dale Carnegie who wrote that a person's name was the "sweetest and most important sound" to them. That's a bunch of crap. The bottom line is that people who enjoy using other peoples' names this way seem to derive a sense of self-importance from it, since in our culture the tradition is that only someone in a position of authority (such as your mom, dad, school teacher, etc) should use your name in such a manner. So it is very pretentious for anyone else to do it.

That is why pretentious people do it.

As for the Carnegie quote, it's from a book called "How to Make Friends and Influence People." Isn't it creepy that someone would make use of a technique, such as using your name this way, to influence you?

Someone above wrote that you should ask the perpetrator to stop. In my experience, name abusers tend to be highly defensive about their practice when confronted. It's like you are infringing on some divinely ordained right they have when you ask them to stop using your name superfluously. It becomes clear that they just can't stand to lose the ability to assert higher status over you by using your name this way. And it doesn't matter how politely you ask them not to do it. They still go gorilla. This just underscores the point that the practice is pretentious.

Another fact that underscores this point is that people tend to do it when arguing, to express the idea that the listener is immature.

What can you do about it? My response has been to myself use my own name, in place of the pronoun 'I' whenever speaking to the pretentious blockhead. But you have to do it for a while before they get the point and back off. Using your own name instead of 'I' is not only annoying to them, it also reverses the higher-status thing because it's like saying to your kid "Daddy wants you to go to bed now" instead of "I want you to go to bed now."

Hope this helps.