Pretending not to be what you are

I like to ask people about where they come from, particularly when I see or hear a name with an origin that doesn't tally with who they apparently are. As one might imagine, these days I tend to look for the "ić" endings in their various disguises - I even asked my mother recently about the obviously English name Aldrich that is in our family history (I still wonder, frankly). I have a nominally German colleague who's surname has the German ending itsch and he admits, with just a bit of reluctance, that at least part of his family history is from somewhere down in the Balkans (in fact, he shares a name with a famous, heroic Croatian politician who is now on the 200 kuna note).

A few years ago, I met a rather strange Austrian fellow once who's surname was pretty clearly simply the name of an animal in a Slavic language. When I asked him where he was from, he said that he was from the south of Austria, some old family. When I said that it sounded curiously like the animal name in Serbian, a Slovenian, also in attendance, broke in and said that it was in fact exactly the word in Slovenian. Ah, I said, so some of your ancestors must have come from Slovenia, zar ne? No, he said, it was south Austrian. Eventually, I think he conceded that his name was probably Slavic, but there was also this reluctance to do so.

There are other examples that are more poignant somehow, in that they involve people denying their true origin rather than their ancestry. I heard of people in the UK who would say that they were (say) Irish but were actually be Czech, and of course anybody who's lived in both North America and the UK can probably spout off dozens of examples of people feigning Britishness despite being born in (say) Oklahoma. And the fake accents can make your ears bleed, even if people from (say) Oklahoma would probably never notice. Once I met an American living in Paris who, upon hearing that I lived in the UK for a long time, said: "I'm glad you don't have that stupid accent that so many people try to make up".

Not all people deny their ancestry. Certainly in the once highly multi-national Austria, I've met a lot of people who embrace it. But it is just frequent enough to warrant mention. The simple fact of the matter is that some people just seem to be ashamed of who they are, and think that somehow they will do better in this world if they hide it. This seems a stark contrast to the attitudes of people at home, who are almost invariably proud to be who they are. As ever, I don't have a sensible ending to this, but just a thought: take some more of this pride abroad, and remember you don't normally get many points for being a pretender.