Instead of Dan the Man, we have a friend that we call Daniel the Maniel. He doesn’t seem to mind. 
My ex was a Larry, not a Lawrence.
And as for “mature” names, please consider your child’s aduldthood when choosing a name. I can not envision a Candy or Buffy or Pansy being taken very seriously after the age of 2.
I work with “Azell.” About one in ten get his name right. I nicknamed him “Ace” and even that gets butchered.
I’m Carol Anne.
And what’s your last name.
My name is Carol Anne.
Okay, Caroline, what’s your last name?
It’s Anne. A-N-N-E. Carol-----------Anne.
Stteeeerrrriiiiike 1!
Sttteeerrrriiiike 2!
You also may not call me Tamster, Tamola, or Tamaroonie.
Makin’ copies!
It’s a Pennsylvania thing, I think. I just get incredibly tired of it. At this point, I really respond to either pronunciation as only Jenny and my family ever get it right.
Gen-eh-vive. Her given name is Jenny, and she’d like her family to still be able to use it. (Eases the whole “She doesn’t like the name we picked” sting, hopefully.)
Plus it sounds better with her chosen middle name, Mara (she doesn’t have one now).
I’m Charlotte, and a few people call me Char. It’s not my preference, but I can live with it. The thing that I hate is that no one can spell my name. It usually shows up as Charolette, but I’ve also seen Charlet, Sharlot, Charllotte, Charolte, and (inexplicably) Shalrot.
I also kept my name when I got married, and many people–even those in my family–have a hard time getting that. They just refuse to acknowledge that my name isn’t the same as my husband’s.
My grandparents used to call my mom Lisa (her name is Liz). They did that because Liz Taylor was an “immoral woman” and they didn’t want to call their DIL by that name. After she and my dad got divorced, they had no problem with calling her Liz, though.
I’m another one with this problem. The first name on my birth certificate is “Danny.” To add to the confusion, my middle name is “Ray.” Not Daniel, not Raymond. This isn’t uncommon in the South (Billy Bob, Bobbi Jo, etc.), but I remember a couple of teachers insisting that I use my given name, not my nick name.
I’ve got a slightly different issue than most.
My given name is a common name. My nickname is a derivation of that common name, but it’s usually a name in its own right.
Apparently, it’s rare for people to have the name Julia and go by Julie. It baffles the hell outta most people.
My name is Hamish. Actually Hamish. It’s one of the two names on my birth certificate, and I don’t like the other one. My mother was very proud of her Scottish heritage.
This gets me into trouble on two fronts. The first is from actual Scottish people who keep telling me that, “Hamish is not a real name.” Just why it isn’t seems to be murky, and I venture that since this name is now inscribed on at least one birth certificate, and since I’ve carried it around all my life, I feel it’s now a real name, if it wasn’t before.
Second is the trouble from those who’ve never heard of it. I get all kinds of pronounciations (“Heimlish”, “Hammish”, and from francophones, “am-EESH”). Since it’s meant to be the Scottish form of James, I don’t mind if people call me James, and many of my close friends do.
But a couple of people have tried “Jim,” or “Jimmy.” The only person I let call me that, longterm, was an employer who had a lot of trouble with English in the first place.
Anyone else doesn’t get to call me that twice :mad:
Let me just say for the record:
I have heard every “Debbie Does…” joke that can possibly be thought of. It got old by the time I was 20. And I always have to spell it, since there are about 8 acceptable ways. “no, no…the easy way. D. E. B. R. A.”
Shalrot would’ve been a great messageboard handle.
My dad’s name is John. Until approximately a year ago, my own brother (as in, my dad’s own son) assumed it was short for Jonathan.
My brother is 14, by the way.
As for me, most nicknames (my name is Julianne) are okay with me - Julie, Jule, Jules, Julie Bean - but anyone who calls me Julianna or Julia is just asking to be socked in the face.
Why the hell are people going around giving their children nicknames anyway? Sure, I can understand that you might like Cathy, or Alex, or Dan, or whatever as a name for your kid, but wouldn’t it make more sense to give a traditional first name like Catharine, Alexandra, or Daniel to the little bugger than to curse it with eternally trying to convince bureaucrat types that yes, my real name is Dan? Just seems so damn odd to me . . .
I have irritations with my name as well. My first name, Damon, has never been common, but it seems to have become moreso lately. However, it’s become common among black people, despite the fact that I am a white German-English-Pollack mutt. My parents inexplicably combined it with a hispanic middle name (and not a euphonious one at that) so that my name seems to imply a much different ancestry than my own.
Add to that the fact that with the fact that inevitably, the first time I introduce myself to someone, it’s heard as “David”. Ok, no shock - both two syllable names, identical first syllable, and David is considerably more common. However, on repeating it, it inevitably turns into Damion. Now, where did that extra syllable come from? It’s even more disturbing when it’s read from a list. None of those five letters could ever conceivably stand for the /i/ sound. There are only two vowels, therefore the name has at most two syllables.
Combine that with the always clever jokes about the son of the devil (which apparently have their origin in some horror movie I’ve never seen) or the sonic similarity to “demon”. Gosh, that one just gets funnier and funnier. :rolleyes:
In my mum’s family, Michael was known as Charles, Cecilia as Nancy, and George as Edward – not one of these ‘known as’ names was part of their official names!
And Michael’s son Michael is also called Charles…
My mum is called Carolyn, and she has been fighting people all her life who insist on Caroline, including my dad.
She grew up as Carrie, so when I came along, she decided it would be my name, too, but she chose a different spelling – Carey – which is also the common surname, and also the male version.
So I have received letters addressed to me as ‘Mr’ all my life…people can’t understand why this drives me up the wall. Probably because until age 31 I included my very definately female name as part of my official name to avoid just such a problem. And after age 31, I would fill out forms with ‘Dr’. And I STILL get Mr in reply.
Where it was really festive was in Dulles Airport, when I had purchased plane tickets using Dr, and the machine spat them out as Mr because I had bought them over the phone with a travel agent who thought I must be buying them for my husband. I do not look like a Mr. Fortunately it was all sorted out…
I get people who insist my name must be Carolyn or Caroline – I had a teacher at school who called me Caroline because she said she did not like to call people by nicknames. A couple years ago, when I was staying with my auntie in Scotland, she mentioned that some of her friends asked her if I were a Caroline or Carolyn because they didn’t wish to call me by a nickname.
There are 12 billion variant spellings of my name…I’ve bbeen saddled with them all. I also get Casey and Karen. But the one that really set me off was an older woman in the same graduate programme with me who informed me she did not like the spelling of my name, and from then on out, was going to spell it ‘Kari’ ! Wtf?! She actually got some people to go along with it.
When I was 11, there was a boy in my class called David Carey. My teacher used to think it was the height of wit to remark, every other day, that if I married him, I could be Carey Carey :rolleyes: First time, ok, it’s a weak joke – but he was relentless.
And finally (I am sorry, but crikey this is cathartic to know I’m not alone!) my name can be pronounced several different ways, I’ve learnt. None of those variants bother me in the least. People closest to me say Care - ee. I will also readily answer to Carrie (my sister and one brother say it this way). German and French speakers pronounce it slightly different, and I like it, the way it sounds.
My point? Someone in my high school class who said it one way actually slapped another girl for saying it the other way! I mean, bloody hell, it never bothers me, I had never kicked up a fuss about it when it was pronounced differently, and the aggressive girl wasn’t even one of my friends. Daft plonker.
Not me, but my sister – she’s a Debra, too…not a Deborah, as my mum’s MIL insisted on spelling it…
Maybe I’m living up to my nickname of Dumbelina, but what’s the difference between these two? Does one of them have a long A? To me, those both look like how I pronounce my name (Kerry).
My name is Emma. None of my family have ever trued to shorten it. A girl at secondary school used to call me ‘Em’ which never caught on. It didn’t bother me, I just thought it was odd. One of my friends once called me ‘Emily’, thinking that it was my real name. He faltered in the face of my death-stare, and now only calls me Emma. Or, sometimes, Stupid-Head.
I have two brothers - Sam and Thomas. Sam’s full name is Samuel, but no one ever called him anything but Sam (except for a couple of years when he was little, and insisted on being called Samuel Roy). Thomas, on the other hand, has always been Thomas, and never Tom. When he was younger, if teachers called him Tom, she would tell them that he was not a Tom, he was a Thomas. Oddly enough she never did the same for Sam. Weird…
When I take roll for the first time with each of my classes, I give the standard apology for butchering names, particularly last names. I call students by whatever name is printed on the roll sheet, after giving them the instruction that when I call their name, to answer “here” if that is the name they would like for me to use, or to answer with the name or form of the name that they would prefer if that is not the case. I’ve been doing this since I started teaching, and I never assume anything about what a person prefers to be called.
While doing my student teaching, I went through this on the first day I took the class. One young man, whose actual name I’ve forgotten (let’s call him Robert) answered that he would prefer to be called Goober. I dutifully penciled in this alternative and proceeded to call him Goober for the next few weeks.
The class’s regular teacher was evaluating a lesson one day, and happened to be overseeing this particular class. Afterwards, she seemed appalled that I was calling young Robert “Goober.” I expressed surprise, assuming that I’d been the victim of some practical joke. I was mistaken. Goober actually did go by that name among his friends, though the teachers called him something else, which he was used to. Apparently, he didn’t ask teachers to call him that, but was curious to see if I would go along with it or not.
My supervising teacher told me I should stop calling him Goober, and start calling him Robert, her reasoning being that Goober was inappropriate. Exactly in what way, she couldn’t elaborate, except that it should be obvious. My take was that it was appropriate to call a student what he preferred so long as the name wasn’t inherently offensive. She believed that Goober fit that description. However, as neither I nor Goober found it so, I continued to use it.
This teacher had other problems (incompetence, apathy, surliness, etc.), and chose this issue as one worthy of reporting to my university supervisors as evidence of my “insubordination”. She even recommended a failing grade for student teaching, which my supervisor and the head of student teaching chose to ignore.
On another note, I was taught early that you address adults by calling them by whatever name they use to introduce themselves. To do otherwise is impolite. I extend this same courtesy to everyone.
Some English lects don’t have two different A sounds as in this example. For example, some lects have the first vowel sounds in “marry,” “merry,” and “Mary” all different. In my lect, all three words are homonyms.
As a fellow Colin (that’s CAH-LIN, in case you don’t know), I can sympathize with Ethilrist. I have yet to have anyone give me a nickname that sticks, although many a year ago a good friend of mine complained that my name was not good for nicknames, so he took to calling me “Col-bo” for a little while.
Currently, the closest thing I have to a nickname (but nobody calls me it) involves my middle name (Evans) - “Cevans”, pronounced sevens. The friends who made it up have called me that approximately twice in the year since its inception.
I could go with the Colinator, though.
Of course you’re not daft! I forgot, that some words can sound alike, with matt_mcl’s example of Mary, marry, merry – I say those 3 with distinctly different vowel sounds, but my dad is from Baltimore, and my own accent is a right old mix up!
Let’s see…hope this helps: one way to say my name has the A sounding like the A in ‘care’ or ‘air’.
The other A, what I think of as the ‘Carrie A’ if you like, would be like the A in ‘cat.’
Sorry for the confusion! I have no idea how to write out phonetically what my name sounds like when my French and German friends pronounce it; it’s not only the vowel that changes subtly, but also the accent is on the second syllable, and not the first…it sounds positively exotic, and I like it! 