Today (Friday) is the official deadline for The Journal of Wordplay #3. If you’ve spoken to me about an extension, what I said there still applies! Anyone else who’s thinking of contributing…keep things percolating. The time to publish #4 will be here before we know it.
Coming up: I’ve got some long-awaited study for The Journal to share and a quick look at the process behind the Ubercross T. But first, let’s talk about another T. This is also an exploration of words and language, but it’s one that I’m uniquely qualified to make.
Every so often, I’m in correspondence with someone and they say, “Hey, so what’s your name, anyway? I just realized I never learned it.”
This doesn’t trouble me. It usually makes me chuckle. I know it’s a friendly gesture. I just never thought I was being unclear about this!
The simple truth is my name is “T Campbell.” The details are more complicated, as is usually the case in our fallen world.
I was born William Terrell Campbell, Jr., and that’s the name I use on my taxes. It’s my legal name. I could change my legal name—I know others who have. But that seems like a series of hassles that’d cost me more in aggravation than they’d gain me in pride or convenience.
Why was I never “William”? Or “Bill” or “Bil” or “Will” or “Wil” or any of the other variations available?
Basically, because lots of other people were, starting with my own dad. I remember having at least one classmate named Will who I discussed this with.
“Terrell” persisted among family for a long time, and some of my well-loved relatives still call me that today. The neighborhood kids struggled to pronounce the name, though, and later, both classmates and teachers would struggle to spell it. My childhood best friend called me T, and I got more and more comfortable with that as a “name for friends.”
From early childhood, I started entertaining ideas of becoming a writer, and that pushed me further toward “T,” too. A byline that’s short and easy to remember like T Campbell is better than one with too many double l’s and uncertain pronunciation.
At some point, I no longer saw the point in compartmentalizing. By then, T was who I was.
Some writers are known by their initials, such as H.G. Wells and W.H. Auden, but I never wrote my name “T. Campbell.” Because I didn’t see it as a shortening or an abbreviation. It just felt like me.
Some people could be weirded out by this, but the friends in my life, before and after the transition, usually accepted it pretty quickly. There was only one person affecting my life who didn’t. And for all his talk about being an expert on “friends,” I’m not sure how much he really knows about friendship.
Yes, of course, I’m talking about Mark Zuckerberg.
After some years of maintaining a Facebook account as “T Campbell,” I was told to produce some legal ID with that name or get out. Now, I have no doubt this was part of a general crackdown on “anonymous users” that was designed to curb abuse. Some people who were using accounts not tied to their government-issued ID cards were making dummy accounts so that they could troll other users without consequence.
But like a lot of big-tech policies, the move was following an arrogant assumption of a one-size-fits-all solution. I was hardly the only person whose realest, honest, truest name didn’t match what was on my driver’s license.
By then, I’d published printed books as T, which helped my case. I managed to find some actual flesh-and-blood Facebook employees who could bend their directives for me a bit.
The result of those bent directives was a solution half sensible, half ridiculous. On Facebook, after that and up to the present, I would be known as T William Campbell. I get the first name that I use, Facebook gets two government-approved names out of three that it can verify with my driver’s license. Everybody wins, at the cost of nothing but our collective dignity!
It’s a loaded question how much of your name belongs to others. A name is how others hold you in their mind, how they define you, how they know you. If you have a name for yourself that you keep entirely to yourself, or only use while gaming, is it really your name, in the final analysis?
But I tend to fall on the side of the belief that your name is for you to define. I’m being a bit cheeky about the Facebook stuff—I’ve always had a strong sense of self and never felt too tied to social media, so I can afford to be. For someone else—many trans people, for example—the ability to rename oneself becomes a lot more serious.
Compared to that kind of struggle, I haven’t had nearly as much to worry about. But yeah, T’s my name. It’s what’s on the spine of my published books, it’s what my wife and family and friends call me. It’s me!
(I sometimes wish I’d picked something a bit more Googleable, so that a search for my name didn’t yield every “Donald T. Campbell” and “Chris T. Campbell” and so on to ever live. But too late for that now.)