Yes I have to deal with Kath/Cath/e/a/rin/rine/ryn … as well as Kathy/Kate/Katie
Jakob Browne?
My name is Rachael. I get called Crystal fairly often and the other day I got an email response where someone called me Richard. Seriously…Richard? People are so dumb sometimes.
My first name is Suzanne. About 90 percent of the time, when I give my name to a stranger, they come back with “Susan.”
No. It’s different. Not that different–but different.
Working in a department store, when I had my name on a badge, for some reason most people got it right. So it’s not that it’s a difficult name.
But I’ve had my problems with names, so I can’t really fault anybody. I once had a job where I spent a lot of time answering the telephone and conveying messages. One of the people who called, a lot, was (and here my memory sort of blips out) either Jack Beam or Jim Daniels. I always wrote it down wrong as either Jack Daniels or–well, you can guess.
But this was after several years of being miscalled as Susan, or occasionally even Sharon, so it certainly wasn’t a case of instant karma.
That’s funny! My middle name is Lynne and I have the hardest time the other way around. (I go by both my first and middle names because my first is absurdly common.)
Along the same lines, my last name is a common male first name and is often misheard as a female first name. It’s only happened on a couple of occasions but one notable time was when I went to the bank to open a new account and walked out with papers in hand before I realized that the customer service agent switched my names and didn’t even use the female form of my last name. Seriously? I don’t look like a boy.
Ooh. I forgot about that. My first name has 3 doubled letters, and one will often either be omitted (consonants) or replaced with another (vowel)
All three of my names can be first or last names. In fact my first name is more common as a last name and my last name is more common as a first name. Thanks, Mom and Dad!
I am resigned to explaining which name is which. This was not always the case; I can remember filling out (correctly) a library card application three times because the librarian thought that I had done so incorrectly.
My son’s names are clearly first names as a result.
My annoyance is around the spelling of my first name. It’s Russell. Not Russel. I have never seen the first name Russell spelled with one L, but about 90% of people that I give my name to spell it wrong.
From baby name sites it seems that Russel has been used and there about 14000 of them. But there are 350000 of us Russell’s.
No one can pronounce my last name “right” without being corrected, but right is in quotation marks because technically, my family pronounces it wrong. Ah, the joys of German last names corrupted by Texan ancestry. One of my high school teachers consistently pronounced it in the original German style, which I eventually accepted as “close enough.”
My first name is Anna. It is NOT pronounced On-na, but most random people I encounter seem to think it is.
I have a friend named Sara who I will call Sarah intentionally just to get her goat.
Oh I will… I will…
There was a kid in my class at High School who pronounced his last name “Harra-dyne” even though it was the standard spelling of “Harradine”.
The odd thing was his older brother pronounced it the standard way: “Harra-deen”. I don’t know what their parents used.
Wherever he is now, I assume his branch of the family will forever after have his unusual pronunciation.