“JEHS”, RIP (2001-2023)

Plus Some Exciting New Developments at The Hinternet

1. Who Dey?

In 2001 I began receiving phone calls from strangers asking me if I was “really Justin Smith”. Yes, I of course said. “The real Justin Smith?” Again, what answer could there be but yes? I was living at the time in Cincinnati, and only slowly would I learn that that city’s beloved football team, the Bengals, had recently recruited a corn-fed, burly Missourian by that same name to play as their quarterback. Soon a profile of him appeared in The Cincinnati Enquirer, with interviews from friends and family about life with this future star, somewhere out in the profoundest rural reach of the Midwest. “If I had to carry a half-bucket of feed, he had to carry a full bucket!” Smith’s sister reminisced. I thought this was funny, so I ended up putting it on my office door, along with the article’s frontal portrait of the footballer’s inconceivably thick head and neck. “Wait a minute,” my students began to ask when they came to my office hours, abandoning all right common-sense in the face of this statistically not terribly improbable proper-noun homonymy, “are you the Justin Smith?!” Again, what else could I say but yes?

Justin Smith moved on to a stellar career playing for the 49ers, and has long since retired. I for my part am still very much in the game, but this early-career experience did alter me with lasting effect — it caused me, namely, to insert my middle initials, “E. H.”, and to insist for the following twenty-two years that my real name is nothing other than “Justin E. H. Smith”, that without the initials it’s just not me. In Canada, when people asked me what these letters stood for, I would sometimes joke that they represented my new aspiration to Canadianness, and stood for nothing but “eh”. In France, I would learn that there are entire cultural-linguistic realities where people simply do not use middle initials, just as there are others where they do not use semi-colons, and that these two noble graphemes could count for nothing there.