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Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Bouba-Kiki…?


Now that I’m well into my dotage, and taming my thoughts is harder than trying to herd the ants that live on the porch, I have to wonder why nobody seems to understand why I have taken to calling myself G. It’s a perfectly balanced name, and seems to act as a subtly nuanced, although unclassified, ideophone (a word that conveys a sensory experience). I particularly enjoy the ‘djeh’ part of the sound for some reason.

But I do not come to bury G, or to praise him as Shakespeare’s Marc Antony might cleverly have confessed in an admittedly different context; I’m merely trying to explain why certain words -certain names– seem to have subtle effects on people hearing them. I have (of course) touched on this topic before[i], but like Michel de Montaigne, my views often expand with time.

A recent article I read[ii] inadvertently dropped a trail of crumbs that I thought might lead me to a cleverly disguised reason why I sometimes used to have trouble finding summer jobs during the summer breaks between semesters in university. These things have to be camouflaged from the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) I suspect; companies cannot openly condemn applicants on the basis of Bouba-Kiki impressions I don’t think.

For those who have not -or refuse to- read my appended essay, the Bouba-Kiki Effect refers to two made-up words which people across cultures apparently associate with round and prickly objects, respectively. And, although it sounds rather Brothers Grimmish, even a group of little chicks preferred a spiky shape when they heard the word ‘Kiki’ and a round shape when they heard ‘Bouba’ (according to some researchers in an old 17 May bioRxiv preprint at any rate).

Memories colour things, don’t you think? In one of mine, I have a somewhat blurred recollection of the expression of the woman who interviewed me for my first job one summer. Admittedly it was in small-town Ontario where the library was a tiny building attached to the department store on its only main street; it was also long before the internet was invented, and résumés, if there were several jobs for which I was applying, had to be typed again and again, or clean unsmudged carbon copies thereof submitted in white unblemished envelopes. Well, maybe it wasn’t really that bad, but memory does that sometimes, eh?

At any rate, I showed up for the interview in the suit I’d worn for my high school graduation, forgetting about my unmanageable curls and refusal to get a haircut just for a job. I can’t say my mother didn’t warn me, but she was also the one who kiboshed my interest in Philosophy, or Journalism, insisting that I had always been interested in becoming a doctor -and they would never show up for a job interview with unruly (albeit curly) hair being her unstated, but clearly visible facial opinion.

But I was young, rebellious, and ever-mindful of who was paying for my university education. So I compromised by attempting to back-comb my hair; it also made me a bit taller, although the wind usually did that on its own.

I suppose I would have tweaked to the Bouba/Kiki thing if I had been as well-read as my parents from their obsession with the Reader’s Digest magazines carefully stacked and annotated in the family bathroom. But, blissfully ignorant of much of the less erudite knowledge summarized therein, I confined my reading to the ever increasing volumes of the Encyclopedia my mother kept getting as a deal from the supermarket if she spent a certain amount of money on groceries there; I don’t know how I could have missed Bouba-Kiki, though.

Anyway, the woman at the library where I was applying for a summer job was very pleasant; they had picked her, I’m sure, because she had a permanent smile almost tattooed on her face; her teeth were of the straight, just painted picket-fence variety, and her hair was oh-so-neatly coiffed. She must have been rather short, however, because apart from the top of her snow-white blouse, not much else of her body was visible above the desk where she sat.

Actually, that’s not quite accurate: although she merely looked up from a mess of papers on her desk, and never rose from her seat when I entered, she did proffer a rather gnarly hand with well-manicured fingernails, and then buried her eyes in the papers on the desk again.

After a short pause, she looked up, still smiling, and asked me my name. I suppose it was only my nervousness at the interview, but I think I over-pronounced the ‘G’ in Gary, my first name; I think I made it sound… well, aggressive, or something -like I was challenging her to compete with her first name in response. Perhaps I’d dropped a gauntlet, although she never stooped, or even leaned over to pick it up.

“And what makes you think that you would be a fit for a job with us Gary?” she said, italicizing the ‘G’ mercilessly. More than italicizing it, she actually threw the ‘G’ at me like a baseball to a plate; a baseball meant to injure the batter if he chose not to move out of the way.

I swung. “Well, Miss Jones,” I enunciated clearly and confidently (the name had been on the door, and in those days there was no Ms to fall back on if you weren’t sure of their marital status), “I would be interested in any job you might have available for the summer until I return to my studies at the university.”

She frowned and her smile almost disappeared. “So, what is your major in the university for the coming year…?”

I was certain I heard an ellipsis that she had deliberately added, so I realized this was the time to aggrandize. “Philosophy,” I said, and narrowed my eyes a little to show that I, too, was evaluating her.

As if she had been saving her real smile just for the occasion, a dimple appeared on one cheek. “I was thinking of majoring in Philosophy,” she said, with a dreamy look in her eyes. “But…” She shrugged and left her thought untethered in the air.

I was clearly supposed to follow up on her hesitation: a ‘but’ is not left hanging for no reason. I took the bait: “But…?”

“But I got pregnant,” she said with a sigh and sent her eyes to rest for a moment on my cheek. “I never got a chance to go back and finish my degree.”

I smiled in response, and I think she liked that.

“I’m sorry if I seemed aggressive when you walked in; do you have a middle name?”

That seemed an odd question at a job interview, but what the heck, I needed the work. “James,” I answered. “I actually prefer it to ‘Gary’, and tried to use it each fall when I went back to school; but if anybody did use ‘James’, I would usually think they were addressing somebody else and it would lie fallow for another year, another try…”

She laughed at that, and the dimple on her cheek grew. “I think we could use someone like you here, you know… James,” she added softly. “You can start on Monday.”

Maybe there is something to the Bouba-Kiki thing; maybe I’ve been too Kiki, eh?

[i] https://musingsonretirementblog.com/2025/02/16/speak-the-speech-i-pray-you/

[ii] https://theconversation.com/whats-in-a-name-how-the-sound-of-names-can-bias-hiring-decisions-263607

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