I’m a substitute teacher, so I end up seeing a ton of teenagers’ names. The ethnic names (other than Gaelic) I usually get right, often to the kid saying that I’m the first person they’ve met who’s ever gotten it right. The invented names, though, are much more iffy. I always start with what the phonetic pronunciation would be, and try to see if there’s any established name that would be relatively close to that… but sometimes there isn’t, and sometimes (even worse) there’s more than one possible match, and I have to guess which one it is.
Worst of all, of course, is when I then get the same student again later, and miss it again. Yes, yes, of course I try to remember the corrections. But when you’re dealing with every single teenager in all of two suburbs, you really can’t remember them all.
Of course I know it’s a thing. The point is whoever named her that didn’t. Can you imagine how many times she’s going to have to explain her name to people over her lifetime?
I didn’t know it was a thing until I met Chimera, and even then, it was years before I’d heard it spoken out loud. In my head, I heard it like ‘‘CHIM-er-uh’’ which is totally different. So I don’t think it’s obvious looking at the name how it should be pronounced unless you have specifically audibly heard about chimeras. I don’t think she’ll have to explain it because I don’t think the average person has ever heard of a chimera.
I think that was true before genetic chimerism was discovered, but it’s been all over the internet, and the solution to a couple of CSI-type shows (the reason a suspect’s blood sample doesn’t match skin or sperm evidence left on a victim). Anyway, any article or public radio show about genetic chimerism explains what a Chimera is to explain the name.
Fr’ench, O’T’O’H’, seem’s to have a whol’lot more apostophe’s than Engl’sh doe’s. Massiv’ amount’s of apostrophe’s more than Engl’sh use’s.
Spanish does have a few contractions, although they’re not written with apostrophes. The two I can think of are del ( = de el ) and al ( = a el ), but I can’t remember if there’s also a third one.
I knew a Krystyna too, back in the day: Chicago in the seventies. Her last name was a Eastern European looking but I wouldn’t have guessed specifically Polish.
About 30 years ago, someone my parents knew had a baby boy, and my dad said, “What did they name him - Justin, Ryan, or Kyle?”
Nowadays, it would be “OK, which spelling of ‘Caitlin’?”
My friend’s daughter has a spelling of “Olivia” that is unique enough to identify her. When I first saw it, I thought, “Um, WHAT?!?!?” but guess what? The name fits her perfectly and always has. She is NOT “Olivia”.
I used to know a woman who, if she’s still living, would now be about 90 years old. Beginning in the mid 1960s, she was regularly asked if she was Jennifer’s mother.
As for urban legends and names, what about the Orangejello and Lemonjello twins? There aren’t as many twins, period, as some people claim exist of these names. ETA: I see someone else already addressed this.
I’m another Jennifer (mid '80s, so on the tail end of the boom) and am often called Jen-Iffer, two distinct words, by people who remember right in the middle of saying it that I really prefer not to be called “Jen” and hastily, but not quite hastily enough, stick the rest of it in there. At some point it will probably become mildly annoying but for right now it’s still amusing.
There are many others which may happen in casual speech but which are usually not written as they are pronounced: for example para el (not para él; the el is an article, not a pronoun) becomes pal, but if it is ever spelled out like that it is supposed to go in italics as it is not “the proper spelling”.
I recently finally figured out where the unusual name of one of my coworkers came from. His mother tried to transliterate the word Jedi into Spanish, the way it was said by the dubbers in Episode IV. For later episodes, a lot of nouns had already been absorbed into the language and the dubbers would pronounce them the way fans say them, which tends to be several phonemes away from the original English. She did very much not spell it Jedi, but as it’s unique I’m not going to spell it out.
