I have been elected to the Executive Board of a professional organization. In the two communications I have had with the board members so far, they have addressed me as “Khalida” and “Professor Slocum.” There is no Khalida Slocum on the organization rolls, I checked. Neither Khalida nor Slocum are remotely similar to anything in my first and last names. The closest I got phonetically to these names is that I’m from Kharkiv.
I understand that these are people in the field of foreign languages but I thought there was a general understanding that names don’t get translated.
Clarissa's Blog 
That wasn’t the name of the previous executive, was it?
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It isn’t a real person at all. Which is what makes this particularly bizarre. So weird. But at least I now know that these are true scholars of literature who live in the world of imaginary characters.
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Honestly, I wonder how they would react to the reply, “I’m sorry, but it looks like you sent this to the wrong person.”
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“wonder how they would react to the reply, “I’m sorry, but it looks like you sent this to the wrong person.””
Now I’m thinking that she should create an imaginary persona for this Khalida Slocum (a great name!)
next step: netflix!
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I like it! What sort of person is named Khalida Slocum? It sounds Arabic and low-class British all at once!
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“What sort of person is named Khalida Slocum?”
We need a backstory…. Mine is she’s actually Callie Slocum an impeccable scholar of 17th Dutch poetry but also a completely uninteresting midwesterner. She changes it to Khalida during a fake conversion to Islam to boost her chances at being noticed and/or getting hired making up a story that the original North African last name ‘Slayyukum’ was changed at Ellis Island by an insensitive immigration official.
Figuring that no sane non-Dutch person who’s not interested in centuries old poetry can contradict her she remakes her career finding all sorts of incredibly modern, progressive, nay revolutionary ideas in poets like Justus Pels ‘t Huis whose ‘Broken Flowerpot’ is now a stirring ode to defunding the police or Katje de Groos whose ‘Yellow wooden shoes’ is a rejection of gender roles and an ur-expression of some aspect of queer theory (let’s call it ‘intra queer outsexing’).
She not only gets hired, then gets tenure but finds herself the head of a prestigious academic organization, when……
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Gosh, I hope it’s not some porn personality that everybody except me knows about.
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Have you had any contact with anyone from this organization that’s not just through email? There are all kinds of fake academic associations in the Internet age…
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This is the biggest professional organization in my field, and everybody on the board is very well know. Except f the darn Khalida.
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Next someone will call me Mister Tsuburetanabe … 🙂
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