I think a lot of the venom is coming from people who either a) have been forced through parental mis-naming (or parentally butchered spelling) into a lifetime of having to go through some combination of spelling, pronouncing or explaining their name to everyone they interact with on even a casual basis, b) people who feel awfully sorry for the people in column a, or c) people who for one reason or another spend a lot of their professional life dealing with parental naming disasters.
It’s certainly your right to name your kid “Aedin Caughner Niquolos”, but it’s also the right of other people to think you’re a prat for doing so. Of course, it’s also not you that gets to spend the next 70 or 80 years patiently correcting spelling and pronunciation of your weird-ass name.
Thus speaketh the woman who’s father actually misspelled her name on her birth certificate and whose name was changed at age 6 days because the nurses kept pronouncing it “Jelly” (for the record, my original given name was “Geli” pronounced “Gay-li” - the affectionate diminutive form of my mother’s given name (“Angelika” pronounced “Ahn-gay-lica”) by her and the rest of her family, as they’re German. My mother was (and still is, actually) known to her family as “Geli” - sort of like most Nicholas’ are Nick or most Roberts are Bob. Reasonable pick of baby name, really) My mother got sick of this and sent my dad to change it on the birth certificate. I assume it was the drugs that caused her to send him without the name written down, as everyone who knows him is aware that my father cannot spell. Hence my new name was spelled phonetically. However, everyone else in the free world spells my name with a silent, prosthetic “h” on the end.
I’ve learned to spell my name to everyone I meet.
Of course, you’d think that the lesson would have been learned the first time, when my father did the exact same thing when my older half-sister was born. The man can’t spell - so my older half-sister is also missing her silent prosthetic H.
The best part is that the name my father wrote down on the birth certificate was not the name my mother intended he write. It was agreed to name the baby after my mother’s oldest sister (since my mom’s name name wasn’t working), who was known by a random nickname that was only marginally related to her given name (Americanized nickname from the not-very-pronouceable-to-Americans German first name). My mother *meant * for my father to change my name to her sister’s given name. What I ended up with was the misspelled, Americanized version of my aunt’s only-tangentially-related nickname. :smack: Nobody realized for a good six months, when my mom had to inspect the birth certificate for some reason.
I’m told the yelling was thunderous - and that she’d have smacked my dad if she hadn’t been three months pregnant with my brother.
My brother, who was named “John”. After his father. Who could theoretically be expected to spell that name correctly. Only six months after my naming disaster, my mother was still a little snippy about the whole thing.
So chalk the fact that when I read your kid’s name, I automatically assumed you were an idiot up to a lifetime of dealing with a poorly-thought-out parental naming issue. Having a rare first name is bad enough when you don’t have to deal with a misspelling of a rare first name. I don’t even want to speculate how irritating it would be to have a randomly-spelled common first name. At least with my first name, people ask how to spell it. It’s just weird enough that people aren’t totally sure (there are at least three equally-likely possibilities). If I were Niquolos, I’m not sure what I’d do. Other than have a Word with my parents for saddling me with that hassle for the rest of my life.
) was unique enought that this wasn’t an issue. Until graduation practice when our principal kept calling her "Prontisha whatever :eek: ! For the actual ceremony he just used her first name. Then there was our Georgian exchange student, Irakli. He went by “Ira” and all of teachers were fine with this except our principal who kept calling him "Iragi!
