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It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anne Strangeamps. What's your name?

Noah, Liam Strange Champs. What's your name? Noah, Liam, Mason, Jacob, Emma, Olivia.

Your name was given to you with love when you were born.

Over the course of your life, it'll become a kind of second skin,

a collection of syllables that tells other people

and you, who you are. How can something so small mean something so big? My name's Pardth Shaw,

and I'm a reporter at Wisconsin Public Radio. Pardth is my colleague here at WPR. He's a young reporter just starting out, and he also

hosts a podcast called Hyphen. He did an episode recently that got a lot of us thinking about the

invisible stories that are hidden inside names. Reporters at the station produce stories for newscasts

that aired during rush hour. Each story ends with what we in the business call a standard out queue.

Maureen McCollum, Wisconsin Public Radio. Gilman Halstead, Wisconsin Public Radio.

Shamin Mills, Wisconsin, Public Radio.

I spent a fair amount of time my first few days in the job trying to figure out how I would say my name in my standard out queue.

It was kind of like in middle school when I would practice my signature in the margins of my notes. My entire life, so school, college, and work, I've been Parth.

Sometimes people have teased me and called me fart or barf,

and sometimes I've been nicknamed things like Parthenon or my personal favorite,

Parther, like Arthur, the character from PBS.

But my name's different when I'm with my family.

My parents don't call me Parth, they call me Parth.

That subtle difference in the way the A is pronounced may seem slight,

but Barth feels like a whole other side of me.

...