I have a very uncommon surname and my given name is not all that common in the US, so I’ve always been jealous of people who had nice generic, easy-to-spell names…the only benefit of my name is that whenever my name is mentioned anywhere, I’m certain it’s me…how is it for those of you with more common names, is there ever any confusion…legally, etc?
I get called by my last name occasionally at work, both in person and by email. I’ve come to accept it, especially since there are 5 other people here (out of 3,000) with my last name as their first name. So, yeah there is confusion even with common names.
I like having a plain, totally anglo-saxon name. There are a number other guys with the name, but none anywhere near me. And only once in my life has anyone mispronounced my name (One of the 12 Apostles).
Dude, are you in Peekskill NY?
I have an very common name. Every school I’ve been to, ever large place I’ve worked, there has been at least one other person with my name. I’m talking first and last together.
It was annoying when I got called to principal’s office in school - that other guy apparently caused a lot of trouble. When I stated working in a very large business a young woman tried to find me, for romantic purposes, and was almost put off her quest by the sheer number of instances of my name. I think she had to work through 4 or 5 people with my name before she found me.
I can only think of two times that having such a common name is an issue, very minor issues actually. 1) Some people can’t stop themselves from commenting. Duh, you say my name is very common? Who knew? 2) Some people can’t grasp that there could be two people with the same name. Every now and then my name will be called and another person steps forward along with me. We get a laugh but the person who called our name can be confused or even hostile.
Actually, the third thing is when businesses try to look up my records. They always need some extra information to narrow the search. Sometimes zip code doesn’t do it.
My name is pretty much in the middle – not common, but not rare, either.
My wife’s maiden name is very rare in the US and is usually mispronounced. OTOH, it was quite a delightful surprise when I found out it was the birth name of my great grandmother.
My first name is fairly common, I’m one of four people in my company of 200 employees with the same first name. It drives the receptionists nuts trying to figure out which one of us to transfer a phone call to because our phone directory is by first name.
Problems?
When I was in high school, the physics teacher was an exchange teacher from London. On the first day of class, he called out my name and complimented me for having “a fine British name!” then when the other students laughed he looked up and saw that I’m Asian.
I got a Notice of Bench Warrant in the mail for failing to appear in court for a speeding ticket. Apparently some guy with the same first & last names had been caught (and rude about it) when he was doing 50MPH in the Disneyland Parking lot. I had to go to the DMV to find out what got screwed up and somehow prove I’d never driven out of my County (i.e. not into Orange County). Fortunately the guy has a different middle initial so they just dropped the matter on that technicality.
No. It seems to be par for the course.
I have a common name. My daughter has a common name, which does not resemble mine at all, yet there are many people who mix up the names.
Other than that, it’s nice. I like blending in.
My legal first name is Richard, which doesn’t really give most people trouble (though I think I once encountered somebody who wanted to spell it “Ritchard”). I’ve had more trouble with going by “Rik”. That’s the least-common way to spell the name, so unless people have seen how I spell it they default to “Rick”; some who have seen how I spell it only seem to remember that I spell it “funny” and default to “Ric”. I rarely make an issue of how people spell it, though. All of the documents that matter are going to have “Richard” on them anyway. I will confess, though, that I get a bit irritated when somebody replies to my e-mail, which has my name spelled R-I-K right there in front of their face, and they still get it wrong.
My last name technically has four or five legitimate spellings — they all come from the same Old Norse root name and spelling variants have crept in over the centuries, but they’re all technically the same name — and I will correct people’s spelling of it. “No, this is how my family spells it.”
I have an usual first name and uncommon last name. As far as I can tell, I am the only one with my name on the planet. One of the reasons that I didn’t change my last name when I got married was that then I wouldn’t be the only one with “my” name. Bad news is that it is constantly mispronounced and misspelled – sometimes by people who have know me for a decade or more. If anyone wants to find me, they can quite easily using the Google. Sometimes having a weird name can be annoying, but I wouldn’t trade it.
My husband’s name, on the other hand, is quite common. It’s nearly impossible to find him on the internet unless you know a lot about him, but it is rarely mispronounced. He likes it that way.
I have common names, first and last, although no middle name. There are five different wiki entries under my name (all the others have middle names). There was a photo in the NYTimes about a year ago of one of my namesakes.
But it is not common enough to cause problems. When I was in HS one of my classmates had the same last name and they once tried to give me a detention for more then three latenesses when the fourth was his. I still remember the Vice Principal, when I claimed I’d had only three, count them out and when he came to the fourth, he gulped and turned a bit green before apologizing.
I’m one of approximately 50 gabillion Jennifers in the US. Last name isn’t so common, nor is it vanishingly rare, but I’ve gotten used to the fact that there’s usually another Jennifer in the group, if not 2 or 3 others. It doesn’t bother me in the slightest. Nobody ever misspells or mispronounces it and I like blending in.
Ironically, I’m named that because my parents were sooooo out of touch that they had no idea how popular the name was. If they’d known, I’m sure I’d be called something else.
No one ever spells my surname name correctly. Well they just want to write it as per the correct spelling of the regular English word… understandable. But still, its not completely rare… in fact there was a criminal who had the same name and was in the news a lot.
My surname had a different spelling, the English spelling of the surname back in Engalnd, but the spelling got changed to the french way of spelling when the ancestor left England. Well I know there were already French ( via Ireland but thats not important. ) people with the same surname, which I guess is why the spelling was changed to match at that the time of immigrating …
Ironically, no matter that its a common french name, no English speaker has ever just wrote my name without asking how its spelt, or suggesting the wrong spelling.
There’s even a common french language expression in the English idiom. I tried saying “the french way” but they still say "and whats that ? "
My first name is also spelt the same in Europe… no different from English spelling there though. So In Vietnam, I went on a cruise and there was some strangeness about the seating. Oh it says what, vietnamese people at our table ? Well which table is it anyway? The other tables are marked… not mine… Well the pretty young girls were working as hostesses and they passed us over to one pretty (therefor rich ?) girl who asked "Hi… Because I am going to france next year… I want to know, Are you french ? "… “What,Oh ,ur, … oh … no…Austra”… They didn’t want to talk then… We found a table to sit at alone … I was with my mother and 10 year old son at the time, so it didn’t matter that much … I just laughed at their assumptions…
My maiden name is very rare in the US - in fact, in Maryland, the only ones with the name were immediate family. I spent a lot of years correcting spelling and pronunciation, but that’s just the way it was.
Then I married into a much simpler and somewhat more common name. I don’t know that I’ve ever had anyone unable to pronounce it, and the few times folks have asked me to spell it, I’m sure it was more out of habit - no biggie. But my husband, my daughter, and I all have first names that can be spelled at least 2 different ways. None are unusual, but we’ve all encountered those who are more inclined to use the spelling we don’t use. Ah well…
??? Someone who only knew your name thought, based just on your name, that you were the romantic interest for her?
Is your name Earnest?
It took me a moment to get that :). We had met, she knew my name and place of work and wanted my hot young bod I guess. This was before the internet so folks had to use phones to call directory assistance.