My surname sounds like not one but two derogatory (British) names for a gay man. You just learn to live with the mockery - it’s generally a sign of inferior people trying to be clever anyway.
My last name is shared by a famous literary character. So I would get: Are you any relation to *Oliver Twist *(if Twist were my last name.) Amazing how many people think that I have never heard this.
I don’t really mind. People usually are just trying to be friendly when they make a joke and so I usually just smile and nod.
I hereby dedicate my grandfather, little uncle and eldest cousin to your uncle. Ignacio is very popular in my part of Spain, you see… If he wants, he can also have my favorite teacher, his eldest son, his father and his father in law.
I got into a lot of fights when I was a little kid. But I’m not sure the name really had a lot to do with it; it was a common excuse, but really, the problem was that I have never been able to accept such rules as “the team including She Who Owns The Ball must always win.” I used to hate my firstname unless I spent a summer in the only town where it’s common… ever since, when people make the same tired old jokes I just inform them they’re several years too late. Mariluz (Mari-Light, in English Mary-Lou) will often get turned into Maribombilla (Mari-Lightbulb) and it’s got several songs, which is funny for such an uncommon name. And people get confused with Marimar (Mari-Sea) and Marisol (Mari-Sun).
MsPumpkin, the other day “Hello Mary-Lou” was on the radio in German. I almost crashed the car!
(unless should be until - d’ooooh)
My first name is the South European spelling (unusual in Germany) of a fairly common , Aramaic-origin given name (which is common in Germany). I often have to correct records etc. on my name, get misspelled in newspapers, and briefly got the TV license collecting authority on my case for paying the TV license on my real name but not on the misspelled name (which they assumed was another person living at the same address). Other than that it’s no hassle.
And a good thing too, as that spelling is the Bavarian version of St. Ignatius’ name and the traditional Bavarian diminutive for Igna(t)z is Nazi…
I also know a “Phuc.” He goes by his Anglicized middle name.
If a kid is going to get teased, he’s going to get teased. He’ll survive it. If he’s like me, he’ll get very attached to his unusual name. (When I grew up, I stopped offering people the option of an Anglicized nickname.) If he still hates it, he’ll come up with something else.
People will go through much worse things in life than having to deal with an unusual name.
I’m torn on the Vietnamese thing. Most Vietnamese I know (actually most people I know are Vietnamese, I suppose) have done one thing I admire in comparison to members of other migrant groups, and they have kept their Vietnamese names. Sure, some decide to legally change to “John” or somesuch, but less so than other groups. The Chinese, for example, seem to usually adopt a Western name. So that’s fine, and if some guy was introduced to me as Phuc, neither I nor any of my white friends would so much as giggle. But on the other hand, I’m not sure I’d actually go out and give that name to a kid who is about to face twelve years in a Western school system.
The female name Bich can be problematic too.
My brother said he spoke with a Vietnamese woman about our nephew’s name, and she said that most people she knew with that name changed it when they immigrated here. I guess it would be like me moving to a country where “PoorYorick” meant “He who fornicates with ducks.”
There’s a reason nicknames were invented, and it’s not ‘pretending you’re a teenaged girl on the internet.’ Growing up as an anglophone with a French name I learned to live with it. Elementary wasn’t that bad (aside from Valentine’s Day, which always saw multiple butcherings), but my high school got kids from four different elementary schools, so at that point it just naturally got shortened* since it was hard for most people to pronounce or spell properly. Nowadays I almost exclusively use the short form–it still tends to get spelt wrong (I go by Marj, people want to spell it Marge), but people can say it easily. And I can handle the occasional joke about blue hair.
*Twice, actually, as the first one fit in a bit too well with a nursery rhyme, so I rather dislike being called by it. It also sounds more childish than the current form.
I think I’ve only actually heard “my” song once all the way through. I’d likely end up with a broken radio knob if I ever heard it on the radio!
“Ohhh, Donna…” blergh.
There was a Vietnamese family at a church I used to go to. The youngest daughter’s name was pronounced “Yoon.” It was spelled “Dung.” When she got her citizenship, she changed it to Kathy.
My Chinese name is nigh unpronouncable to western tongues, so one of my mother’s students (she used to teach Chinese to Americans living in Taiwan, see) suggested a phonetically similar English name. In college, to simplify my paperwork, I had my name legally changed to said english name, followed by my Chinese one as a middle name that I never bother to introduce myself with except to humor the occasional smart aleck who wants to take a shot at it.
The kid is gonna get teased no matter what his name is, but yeah, “Phuc” is kinda planting a giant bullseye on his back.
What’s really annoying is everybody comes up with the same jokes for your name. As a “Mary”, I’ve heard every joke there is (having a little lamb, or a garden, or being asked why I’m bugging them as in that one song, surprise immaculate conceptions, etc.) to the point where I sometimes introduce myself with a joke to head off the inevitable guy who thinks he’s so damn clever. :rolleyes:
I have tried to answer this multiple times, having a name that is virtually unheard of in the States while I was growing up. But I’ve had a hard time expressing myself. How can I explain all of the years? You just suck it up and deal with it. If you’re lucky you eventually grow to love your name. I love my legal name, and the nick I’ve chosen for myself, but for years I went by my baby name* and to this day I don’t admit what my baby name was often.
dotchan is right about the jokes, though. My name was very easy to take for a particular joke. People, it’s not funny.
And to be honest I have come across so many Americans - and I can’t speak for other Western countries, having grown up here, so I don’t know if it’s the same" who don’t even try to pronounce my legal name but just look at it cross-eyed. It’s kind of offensive and insulting when they plow through names like “Wazcinski” with no problem but when they come to mine, which is probably a little lower on the difficulty scale, and pretend to be totally stymied by it. “M…M…M…” For this reason and others I always felt a little out of the norm, a little un-ordinary. And it didn’t help that my parents knew nothing about the Western World of the 50’s 60’s or 70’s as so many other parents did…so I was definitely starting from a negative slate. And I was an only child. Everything combined did cause me to grow a thick skin, but it took a loooooooong time.
One of the things that did eventually reconcile me to my name was the meaning of it - it has a stunningly beautiful and fitting meaning. In little Phuc’s case, however, I would keep his middle initial only and let him deal with it however he wants to. My name is always ___ P. ____ and don’t ask me what the P stands for, I won’t tell you. I don’t like my middle name, but I know it was given to me for a very meaningful reason, so OK, I’ll keep it…but it’s not for everyone to know.
*In my background you get a nick before you get your official name. My family still calls me by my baby name. I guess I’ve grown up a bit, because I can deal with it.
I had quite possibly the worst last name a girl could have. Add to the fact we moved a lot and that to say I was awkward was an understatement…well, it pretty much sucked.
I suffered no end of teasing, from adults and children. To make matters worse, I didn’t end up getting married until I was 32, so I was pretty over it. To purposefully saddle a child with a horrifying and pornographic name, is mean. At least I came by my name honestly through my sonofabitch father.
No, it wasn’t FlamingVaginaOfDeath, but pretty damned close. And no, it isn’t my middle name now and no, no one ever questioned whether or not I would take my husbands name.
So far I have completely failed to grasp Vietnamese orthography and phonology. I’ve tried many times to get someone to pronounce Nguyen for me. The closest I’ve gotten is “Winn,” and I know that’s just an approximation. There are at least two, maybe three nasalized vowels in there – u, y, and en – and somehow it’s still supposed to come out as one syllable! I haven’t been able to diphthongize those three vowels with my mouth.
I tried to work it out with the “Phuc” that I mentioned I knew. I asked him to say his same several times. Every single time, at the end of the word, his lips came together (bilabially), but he insisted that there was no **, [p], or [m] at the end. But the final bilabialness was clear, and everyone else who was there confirmed that his lips were coming together at the end.
I wonder, is it an aspect of Vietnamese phonology to simply discount as null forms that in English we would include as being part of the sound structure?
Someday when I have my girls they are all getting very cute but not too cute first names… Emily or Molly…
I am going hog wild on the middle name though.
Stuff like-
Molly Lightning
Emily Spiderpunch
Please don’t take this the wrong way; I’d be thrilled to have the middle name “Lightning”! But you’ve reminded me of a phase I went through as a preteen. I thought giving names to people was arbitrary and stupid and the whole idea of having all these words set aside just for naming humans was ridiculous, so I decided when I had a kid I would name it “baseball bat”.
Yes, I’m serious. Yes, I’m childless. You’re welcome.
My last name is pretty awful, and the source of teasing all the way through 9th grade. I dealt with it by learning how to rip a person to shreds verbally, whilst my brother got into a lot of fights as a little boy before moving on to sarcastic retorts too. It took until I was out of college before I no longer dreaded people’s reactions when they heard it.
I say advise him to tell people he has no middle name 
Not everyone does, and how many kids are going to know it’s standard to have a middle name in Vietnam too? I’m an adult and I didn’t know until a few days ago that it’s last name-middle name-given name there. Hopefully calling my minor character Mai Lan Kim is correctly formatted.
That’s what I thought about my boys.(that didn’t happen) .
Wyatt, Garret or Calvin. A really manly name. Not like mine. It just made me work harder to be a badass. You have to plan ahead to make a great man.