Bodoni is challenging enough for most Anglo Americans to pronounce. And I really don’t mind Bodoni, in fact I rather like it. However, my mother took a common Italian first name and Anglicized it, and as a result, nobody seemed to be able to pronounce my name when I was a kid. My husband’s last name is pretty standard Anglo, and most people can pronounce it easily.
I’d say that as a general rule, ONE unusual name per person is enough. If you have a common last name, then you can give your kid a customized first name. If you have an uncommon last name, though, if you hang a nonstandard first name on your kid, then your kid will get used to having teachers and others reading his/her name on the list, and mispronouncing it.
I hate my first name. In fact, I went to my podiatrist earlier today, and got my first name mispronounced again. I said “Just change my name on your records, like I told you to do last time, because I hate my first name, and I hate having it mispronounced. I’ll deal with the insurance company myself.”
It’s one thing for an adult to choose an odd or alternative spelling. It’s another thing to give a child a name that will be hard to decipher. Names are part of our identities, and if the first thing that a child learns about his/her identity in school is that s/he’s an oddball, well…
My name is Italian, Michaeleane, but my parents Anglicized the spelling to Mikel Lynn “to aid with pronunciation.”
Did it work? No. Not at all.
I have often introduced myself to people only to have them say my name back wrong. Why? Did you not hear me? Did you think I mispronounced my own name? And when they see it written, they still say it wrong. It’s quite annoying to me since my name is pronounced phonetically. It sounds just like Michael. Do NOT call me Michelle. How the eff do you get Michelle from that? I can almost forgive “mi-KELL”, but absolutely despise “mickle”.
Not to say that I haven’t had some interesting times being a girl with a boy’s name. When I was 17 I started receiving draft registration notices. I went to a small Christian college with separate male and female dorms. It was a small school, only 700 live-in students. My sophomore year I got assigned to the men’s dorm. I tried to move into the room I was assigned but my atempt was thwarted byt the registrar. I’ve never seen administration work so fast to fix a mistake.
A strange or unique name is a great way to weed out telemarketing calls. A couple years ago I started printing “pronounced Michael” on my resumes. So far, so good.
The problem with intentionally misspelled names is it makes everyone spell their names out, even those of us using the traditional spelling. I don’t know how often I’ve been asked, “Is that Greg with one or two Gs?” Tough to answer, because of course it does have two Gs and the other one (anathema that it is) has three. I’ve learned to say, “Two Gs, but not in row.”
Ha, yeah. So my name is more common in other parts of the world, but I’ve never encountered anyone in these parts with it. I’ve never had my name made fun of, and the only comments I’ve ever gotten on it are complimentary, or seeking clarification, as my name sounds a lot like two other more common names. And then I married into a Polish surname just to make sure nobody can spell or pronounce anything about my name. I shorten my first name to something really common, which helps. It’s a dude’s name, so sometimes people are like :dubious:, but other than that, no issues.
I used to hate my name, and wished my mom had just named me something simpler (seriously, all four of my siblings have the easiest peasiest names in the world!), but now I’m over it. On a scale of 1-10, I’d rate it a solid “meh.”
WHY oh why are people so hopeless with other people’s names? How hard can it really be? Why do people’s brains freeze up when encountering a new name? Are humans really all that dumb? (Don’t tell me the answer to that one, I don’t want to know.) All I know is that my fellow Americans suck incredibly bad at knowing the least thing about any foreign languages. And when it comes to names, their English aptitude isn’t all that hot either.
If a name follows a different pronunciation standard than English, most Americans will butcher it, or not attempt it at all. My last name is an uncommon Italian name, that starts with Fop. Even at a Catholic School in New York, no one could pronounce it. For half my life I was Fop the wop. You can guess my first name, which is about as common an Italian American name you can get. My wife, however, is African American. Her given name is a smash up of two aunt’s and her grandmother’s name. As someone said upthread, having one unique name is okay, but having two that are unique makes life hell for her. It was difficult already, since most teachers could not pronounce her first name. We named our son Matthew. She actually wanted to name him Mario, but I protested as that name would be too stereotypically Italian. We got creative with his middle name, however. We wanted to honor my father, John. But there are too many Johns in the family, so his middle name is Ian. So he is half Italian, half African American, with a Gaelic middle name.
I have the opposite problem to everyone else. There are two ways to spell my last name. If you look in the phone book you will see that the way my name is spelled is about 5 times as popular as the other way of spelling it. Yet if I don’t spell my name, 9 times out of ten people will guess that my name should be spelled the less popular way.
I think it has something to do with a couple of relatively obscure sports and politics figures in the last couple of decades who have my name but spelled the less common way.
I like my name I suppose. And other people like it. But a lifetime of shaking hands and having to repeat your name more than once, then spelling it before the other person gets it is terribly annoying.
My grandfather was named Edward. He went by Ed. I’ve wished my parents had named me Edward and I could just be an ‘Ed’ too. Job interviews, parties, over the phone, I have to repeat my name then spell it. Then I get the question on the origin.(Irish apparently) It’s tiresome. Every. Time.
Once or twice i’ve probably said ‘fuck it’ to going to a party because I’m not in the mood to repeat my name for the millionth time. lol.
I have a very unusual name. Growing up, I never met or even heard of someone else with the same name as me. Besides the hassle of no one being able to pronounce it, and no one being able to spell it, that fact bugged me a lot. When I was 15, I started going by my middle name which is completely normal in every respect, and gives me no trouble. My parents were hurt that I rejected the ‘beautiful’ name they had chosen for me, but they weren’t the ones that had to live with it.
My first name is an extremely common first name and a very common last name. According to this site, there are a little over 700,000 people in the US with my first name. As a first name, it is typically spelled one way, and as a last name typically spelled another. Unfortunately for me, my mom gave me the typical last name spelling for my first name. I’ve been dealing with this frustration throughout my life.
My last name, on the other hand, is an extremely uncommon one. There are supposedly around 1000 people in the US with my last name, although I think the number is lower. On top of this, depending on which of my extended family you speak to, there are different pronunciations for it. That’s right. So my second cousins and their entire immediate family, including parts of the family I have never met, pronounce our family name differently than my immediate family.
This is made all the more confusing because people who encounter my last name for the first time typically mispronounce it, either leaving out a letter, adding a letter, or inexplicably removing an entire syllable.
Those of you with names like Michael Jones or Trevor Smith don’t know how good you have it.
I have a made up name. It is very uncommon, bue I don’t know why apparently a few other people in other countries have come up with the same combo. No, we’re not related.
It looks like a misspelling of a commonly uncommon name. Spelling is a bit tricky, but the sound shouldn’t be a problem in either English or Spanish. Some English speakers say they trip over the “r”, but c’mon, if they can pronounce character, they can pronounce the phoneme in my name cloes enough.
Strangely, as a kid, it was my last name that got butchered. In a place where the final “s” is sometimes dropped, people would write my last name with an “s”, assuming I had mentioned it sans the “s”. :smack: A good example of ultracorrection. I was known, even as a kid, for my correct pronunciation. The other words I’ve said were pronounced OK, yet people thought I mangled my own last name?
I like my name, except that it always sounds “youthful” to me. It is hard for me to think that one day I’ll have this name and be 80, 90 years old. Then I just think it means I have to keep somewhat young (in mind, body, and/or spirit).
Not just when you say it. People seem to think I would get my signature at the bottom of my own email wrong. And even my own email address!
I have had many replies to “Dear Mr. Mike”, lots of "Dear Mr. Turnerson"s and once, from Matalan customer service “Dear Mr. William Shakespeare”. I shit you not.
For me, it’s an issue with processing any word without seeing it spelled. I have a hard time even reciting the spelling of something without writing out the letters and literally visualizing it. Once I see the person’s name spelled out, and especially if they give me something it rhymes with and some other mnemonic for the pronunciation, I am OK.
What bugs me is
“Hi, I’m Gwendolen.”
“Hi, Gwen, nice to meet you!”
:smack:
I have an unusual (but not highly so) version of a name that was fairly common when I was born. I don’t like it. Well, I don’t like my name anyway, but I particularly dislike this spelling. For one thing, everybody, and I mean everybody misspells it–even if they see it at the bottom of an email and reply, they still misspell it (which I can’t help but find insulting, like they think I don’t know how to spell my own name).
Changing my name completely, which I’d love to do, is just too much of a hassle legally. And changing it to the standard spelling, which wouldn’t be that hard to do, isn’t an option for me because I’m very word-oriented and the combination of the other spelling and my last name look horrible together and thus would be worse than just putting up with the hated spelling.
And, to top it all off, I absolutely despise my middle name, so I can’t even use that.
I hate this too. Call people what they want to be called, always. If someone introduces themselves as Michael to me, Michael they will be unless they say “call me mike”.
And I have to admit, this bugs me too. What’s “normal”? White anglo saxon protestant is the only normal? Western names are the only normal? That’s just…appalling.
Ha — I was all set to jump Quintas too! My son has his father’s name. My husband likes it and has always been proud to have an unusual name. It’s not hard to pronounce and it’s memorable.
My son, 8, has already announced his intention to give his son the same name. And that son will be with sixth generation to have it; the first was a soldier in the Civil War. It’s very exotic, especially coupled with our last name, yet all five generations have lived in this country.
I guess I have to agree here. As I said in the OP, my first name is a unintentional misspelling of a common first name, but my last name is extremely rare (less than 117 of us in the US) and unpronounceable to those reading it. It has become a common icebreaker/bar bet to show someone my ID and ask them how to pronounce it. Everyone gets one guess and if they get it right they get everything I own… I still have all my stuff. This means I tend to be pretty memorable and rarely have to remind people of my name while I still can’t remember if the other person was a Mike or a John (though a lot of that is because I am terrible with names).
I really like the combination as I am the only person to have ever lived with my first/last name combo. I can enter them in Google and even without quotes the first five pages only relate to me. My brother, however, is so annoyed with it that he has changed how he pronounces our last name to the most common mispronunciation.
So, addition to the OP: Would you name your child in a similar way to what you were named? That is really the heart of the OP; do you, as someone who has lived with a name like yours, think this has made your life better or worse enough that you would/would not do the same to your kid?
If it turns out that people with crazy spellings or new/odd names have a better life because of it, then screw the haters. If they have a harder time, though, parents should take caution.
From what I have seen in this thread so far it seems like this is going to be a very mixed result. Some people embrace their weird name while other loathe it. Maybe I should have made this as a poll.
