My wife works at a pre-school whose population is probably 85 percent inner-city children.
While some of their names have a mellifluous sound to them, you pity the kids who will have to go through their entire lives spelling them out for people, over and over again.
And you can only hope that they have a grip on how to pronounce “apostrophe” from an early age.
Several years back, we had a family register in the Taekwondo school. Mom, Dad, two kids. The kids were named Kal-el and Jor-el.
Aha! I see. And yeah, you’re right, that’s pretty sad on the parents’ part to give a kid a name like that and not even spell it right. 
When I was living in Japan I knew a woman named Mai (“My”). She told me her sisters were named Ai (“I”) and Yu (“You”). I believe these are all pretty conventional names in Japanese, but it wasn’t just a coincidence that they all sounded like common English words. In a case of a little learning being a dangerous thing, the father picked these names out because he wanted his daughters to all to have names that would be easy for foreigners to pronounce if they went abroad. Mai told me that Yu did a year as an exchange student in the UK, and spent a lot of time confused as to whether people were addressing her or not.
How could anyone do that?? I thought I had a list of bad names but they sure don’t beat that.
I worked with a woman named Janice Hurlbutt. She was married so she either took that name or kept her family name. Either way was a bad decision.
My brother named his kids Falling Rain and Tashina Rainbow. He’s an old hippy, so that’s his excuse.
Just wanna say that I’m 28 and have no idea the Carrie-Anne reference outside of Carrie-Ann Moss.
Here’s the Hollies song “Carrie Anne” on YouTube.
I’ve heard the song before, but it wouldn’t be the first, second, or third thing that popped into my mind upon meeting a woman with this name. I had a classmate named Carrie Anne in the '80s/'90s, and I don’t remember anyone ever teasing her with this song. I’m sure that if your name is in a hit pop song then it’s bound to come up now and then, but this particular song is nearly 50 years old.
This is getting to be a Hollies thread. Carrie Ann, and now Eloise!
I’ve always liked the name, and I’m surprised the mother-in-law didn’t know how to spell it. I thought most people my age would know, but I can see younger people making a mistake.
I really like Falling Rain. That’s just lovely.
Here in Hawaii, we get some doozies: Incarnacion and Resurreccion are two that stuck out to me. Other are my Korean pals who pick an Anglicized name. Grant Hyuck Hyun and Jong Ho can be hard to pronounce, but did you have to choose archaic English names like Donald and Larry?
The kicker was not an Asian/Hawaiian thing, though. I had to write out the names of my son’s little league team. A parent complained because his son’s name Kayden was spelled wrong.
No, it wasn’t “Kaydenn”, but “Kaydennn” :smack:
Maybe he’s part Wookiee. You know, from Kashyyyk.
That seems to be a name that a lot of Mormon parents name their daughters.
Oh this pisses me off to no end. It’s bad enough when people make up names or spell them wrong on purpose, but then they act all huffy and offended when you spell it or pronounce it wrong. Look, you added a Y or EE or moved shit around to be original, so why in the world would you demand the other 6, 7 billion on people on Earth to know how to pronounce/spell your special snowflake’s name the first time? I have fairly common first and last names and I generally don’t get pissed when people screw them up, especially when it doesn’t matter, so a reasonable person would act… well… reasonable when a total stranger makes an error. Yeah, you want it spelled right on your Oscar, but who cares what it says on your Starbucks cup?
Nope. I refuse to believe anyone is that ridiculous.
We have all of these permutations, including the original, and also “Mykayla” at our school. And a “Micheal,” who is a girl whose mom goes nuts if you don’t automatically know it’s pronounced “Michelle.”
As others have hinted, what’s frustrating about this is that we’re creating a society in which spelling one’s name every time it needs to be given is routine. Soon gone are the days when a guy could walk up to a registration booth and say “Jason” and have the person know exactly what he meant. Now he has to say “J-A-Y-S-E-N…”
That’s common in, I think, Hong Kong and Taiwan, too. They often pick old person or dated names like Hubert, Melvin, Vivian, or Iris.
The first two names sound like Filipino names, or maybe Spanish. I met a guy named Dolores once.
I have no problem with giving a kid a hard to pronounce real name. My own name is such that I have to spell it out, as my spelling is not phonetic in English, but bastardized (:)) versions exist. I would keep the original, “correct” spelling; I would (hypthetically) name a girl Aoife instead of Ifa if I wanted to.
Incidentally, this thread is relevant to me it seems, as I’m in the position to be thinking of names. Bidding for naming rights for my firstborn starts at $1000.
One of our “joke names” that the people upthread would give is Tevin. He’s a character in “I Love You, Man” whose parents apparently couldn’t pick between Travis and Kevin. I’m sure it’s unrelated that the character is a douche. :dubious:
Tevin, jeezuz. What’s wrong with Kravis?
That one is so stupid you can sleep easy knowing that the idiot parents are going to spend 18 years of bureaucratic frustration as data entry people “fix it” and every single official thing they try to enroll the kid in will reject as possible fraud due to confusion.
Then the kid will snap and dissect his parents with a draw knife before becoming a Batman villain level psychopath.
Reminds me of two sets of twins I knew of some time ago. My uncle and his wife decided to name their twins Trevor and Travis. Too similar to be practical, IMO, plus a bit on the cutesy side.
Then I met a guy (delivered for Frito-Lay to the 7-11 I worked in at the time) who had seen fit to name his twins Trevin and Kevin.