Firoozeh Dumas’s essay, “The F Word,” takes on a humorous and informal tone in order to convey the idea that immigrants will often face discrimination and prejudices if their identities do not conform to that of the American culture. Dumas begins by explaining a prominent obstacle that her family had to face after moving to America--their names. Americans believed them to be different, regardless of the English that they spoke and their American culture. In school, Dumas was made fun of because of her name, but she explains, “How could our parents have ever imagined that someday we would end up in a country where monosyllabic names reign supreme, a land where ‘William’ is shortened to ‘Bill,’ where ‘Susan’ becomes ‘Sue,’ and ‘Richard’ somehow
