I remember the book saying something like "a person's name is the most beautiful sound in the world to them." The book may say to say their name back to them (I don't remember right now), but that's not what I took away from it. It reminded me of when people would make fun of my name (first and/or last) or bring up someone famous who has the same first ("Donald Duck") or last name ("are you related Joan Rivers?"), or someone famous who sounds like my first and last name put together (Doc Rivers), and I never thought it was funny. When I see people make fun of other people's names, the recipient never seemed to enjoy it either.

You’re for sure right about the name thing. It’s so hard to resist commenting on names for a lot of people, I think, due to the extreme asymmetry of novelty. When you meet someone named Michael Jackson, that’s such novel information to you: “there’s a guy right here in front of me who is named the same thing as a famous musician!” Meanwhile, from Michael’s perspective, they’ve been named Michael Jackson and getting comments and jokes about it near-daily for 35 years - and it’s really a boring non-story - they’re named after their grandfather, their parents didn’t care about the other Michael Jackson one way or the other, and they themselves also neither like or hate MJ.

Yeah, you also have to remember that someone has heard every possible joke about their name and their appearance a million times.

I do think Dale Carnegie overemphasizes the importance of saying people's names, and in fact saying people's names in conversation often sounds forced and manipulative, but maybe that's just a cultural shift over the past century.

I don’t have any problem with my name, and it feels manipulative and overfamiliar and I assume someone’s trying to Carnegie me into something if they use it.

Doc Rivers is an awesome name though.

Saying someone's name back to them is also a memory trick to help yourself remember their name for next time.