My mother named me with the uncommon spelling of my name. In addition, I was legally strapped with my stepfather’s last name, which is not a common name (my birth surname is even worse). So any time I have to give my name on the phone, I have to go through this stupid game of phonetically spelling my name. “No, with a ‘V’ as in ‘Victor’. . .no, my name is not Victor!” My wife’s first name is Elayne, which has an obvious problem, and her last name is not common, unless you live in Krakow, so she is always spelling out her name, as well.
I gave up trying to spell it when actually talking face to face with a human (when voting, making a bank withdrawal, etc.) and just hand them my driver’s license.
God yes. My name is english, but very rare to the point that people think it’s German (it’s anglo-saxon). It’s also pronounced in a non-obviously spelt way, so I have to spell it out every time or people will 100% get it wrong.
It’s more painful for my wife, who has an Irish O’ name. The apostrophe isn’t accepted in multiple digital forms, including some airlines and banks, which can cause issues when they want to compare her details with her passport.
I’ve done the “show my DL” bit myself. I use my RL first name here, my maiden name has multiple common-ish spellings, and my married name is prone to being misspelled. It’s just easier to show someone my DL, debit card, or whatever’s relevant to the task for which they need to know how to spell my name.
I thought about starting this very thread.
Spanish speakers have a hard time with any word that has more than 3 consonants in a row, my surname has 4 so I’m used to, when asked for my surname, to say it and then just spell it because I know they aren’t going to get it right.
Amusingly when I was a child a custom started to provide kindergarteners with a “Diploma” when they leave, this custom continues to this day resulting in both my “Diploma” and my son’s having our surname misspelled in the exact same way, adding "e"s between the consonants to make it more intelligible.
My first name has 2 common spellings, and who knows how many "unique* ones, so I continue to occasionally spell it to this day. My family on both sides emigrated from Poland, so “mother’s maiden name” had to be spelled out when questioned, as well as my maiden name. My dad’s name was Thaddeus, mom’s is Loretta, both rare enough to stump lots of people. And the road of my childhood home is especially unique, both in spelling and pronunciation.
Both my husband and our daughter have relatively ordinary names with 2 common spellings. And my grandkids have somewhat less common names which we often must spell out. Even their last name has 2 possible spellings.
Even the street we live on now gets an extra letter thrown in if we don’t add “no b” after saying it.
My last name ends in a German eszett – that funky final-S character that looks sorta like a lowercase Greek beta – and our family’s rendition of it is “sz.” In England that wouldn’t be a problem to say – “ess zed.” Here in my native land it’s “ess zee”. Could be “ess ee” or “ess cee” or – whatever. I go with “Sam-zebra” when I’m on the phone explaining it.
I used to collect misspellings of my name. I gave up after 22. I thought about taking my wife’s name, but it’s Japanese and brings about its own difficulties.
Maybe I should have changed my real name to Kent Clark and used my actual name as my Internet handle.
My niece recently had a baby, which they’ve named Mackenzie. And I’ve thought she’s going to go through life correcting how people misspell her name as MacKenzie, McKenzie, Makenzie, MaKenzi, Mackinzie, McKenzee, Mackinze, and Macenzie.
I have a relatively common first name but it is frequently misheard or often (for some reason) misspelled. I actually had a manager at a job many years ago who could just not wrap her head around it and continually referred to me by often bizarre manglings of the name, and finally just started kind of making fun of it by calling me by exaggerated onomatopoeia of what it sounded like in her head, I guess, (i.e. for a name like “Brian”, using something like “Bri-bi-iao-piano”; I have no idea what was up with that). When I put in a name for a pick up order or waiting for a table at a restaurant I generally give a somewhat uncommon (in American culture) but easily pronounced name with little variation in spelling.
100% my name, Gareth, is uncommon enough in the US but close enough to names that are common (Garth or Garrett) that its guaranteed no one will get it right without spelling it out. At Starbucks etc. I always use my last name.
It doesn’t bug me except when someone does it in email. Like, my actual name and correct spelling is right there in my email, why are you calling me Garth?
My first is easy. My last isn’t too bad, but people tend to substitute a much more common last name which has a couple more and a couple different letters in it. Sorta like “No, no, no. It’s Robison, not Robertson.” So I still get to spell it out frequently.
My late wife had a birth name that was a long ethnic mouthful. It is/was very phonetic back in the Old Country, but not so much in English. Her usual line was “My last name is [_____]; I’ll spell it. A B C …” It was to the point that a couple years before we decided to get married she legally changed her last name to just her first syllable but re-spelled according to English phonics. Didn’t help that much; people still butchered a 4-letter consonant-vowel-doubled-consonant name. Gaah!
She took my last name when we married (no pressure from me), so she was still stuck spelling it. Just differently.
With the advent of so much customer interaction being online I find I have to spell my names to some clerk rather rarely these days compared to even 5 years ago, much less 20. My phone and computer have long since memorized how to spell them so stuffing either or both into some form is easy.
My last name is the same as a certain school counselor on South Park. When I was growing up, half the people I ran into couldn’t figure out how to pronounce it correctly. That problem largely went away after South Park became a thing.
As far as spelling, there was an issue I used to run into with a lot of websites. I guess some “clever” programmers decided that if the first three letters in a last name are “Mac”, then the following letter must be capitalized. That is not true in my case, nor is it true for that school counselor. So I would enter my name in, and the website would “correct” it. Then I would have to contact them and basically say “what is your f’in problem? Do you seriously think I don’t know how to spell my own name?” It doesn’t happen much anymore, but it used to quite frequently, like twenty years ago.
My wife gets it on both her first and last names. Her first name is Summer. Quite often, when she verbally tells someone her name, they assume they heard something else. “Ok Sharon, we’ll take care of that.” Or whatever. And then, her last name is pronounced the same as a well-known hotel, but spelled differently. Looking at her last name written out, you probably wouldn’t pronounce it like the hotel. So that’s always a struggle. If she says her name, the person taking it inevitably spells it wrong; if she writes it down for someone, they can’t pronounce it. She usually says “it’s ____, spelled _ _ _.”
Being half Spanish and half German a part of my name is hard for Germans to spell, part of my name is hard for Spaniards to spell. The pronunciation when read is also often unexpected.
I have a common first name, and a somewhat unusual last name. Some people spell my first name the biblical way, which is wrong, but 90% spell my last name wrong on first try and I have to spell it out for them. Even after I correct them they still have problems spelling it.
I recently learned that my father changed the spelling of his last name when he enlisted in the US Army during WWII, and that it had originally been spelled the way that 90% of people assume it is spelled. I thought about changing it back to the original spelling, but that would only confuse people who know how to spell it now. Sigh.
My last name is rare, so I spell it out by habit. Fortunately, it’s not long or complicated. What gets me is how often people mispronounce a straightforward word. It ends in “ack” and is pronounced that way -rhymes with sack, attack, or leatherback. But people keep saying “eck” or “ick” for some reason, sometimes even after hearing me say it.
My surname is Irish, so it shouldn’t be too surprising for people in the US. But the pronunciation gets bungled every time–and just like the OP, I hand my driver’s license when in person (say, checking in at a hotel, since they need the license anyway).
My last name is almost identical to a well-known singer’s – he has an extra letter, which doesn’t affect the pronunciation – so I’ve often had to correct people’s spelling.
