Kiyomi Lowe regularly hears people mispronounce her name or sometimes forget it altogether. “I get Naomi, Kaiomi, sometimes Kimmy,” she said. It doesn’t bother her: “I’ll respond to anything.”
She is less forgiving when friends and acquaintances forget the name of her dog, a shar-pei. “I get Bruno a lot,” she said. To which she responds: “‘No, it’s Brutus!’ The dog doesn’t care. But I care for the dog.”
Ms. Lowe is a stylist at Al’s Barber Shop, a popular six-chair salon in Boulder near the campus of the University of Colorado. On a recent morning, she fell into a spirited conversation with her fellow stylists and several customers over a delicate question: Should you be responsible for remembering the name of a friend’s pet? What’s the etiquette?
“A big question,” said Jen Himes, a stylist, who conceded that she sometimes made a naming mistake, which pained her. “I’ve gotten a lot of pet names wrong. I’m, like, ‘How’s Pookie?’ And they’re, like, ‘It’s Rufus!’ or whatever.”
“Most people laugh,” she said. “But some people are, like, ‘That’s offensive.’”