Yeah, I guess we changed ours from Gazpacho, or maybe Gestapo. Nobody will take about it.
Your first point is correct (but a nitpick: the L should be uppercase). As for the second, some people think they’re being terribly funny by attributing the name to an obviously incorrect nationality; they’re half right.
My last name is the same as one of the members of a once very famous comedy duo. You youngsters may not know of them, but at one point everybody did.
Anyway, I estimate that I was asked 10,000 times in my life “Hey, how’s [last name of the other guy]?” Delivered with a sly grin suggesting this was the first time anyone ever thought of this clever, clever line. So, yeah, it gets old and boring having a last name that’s a softball joke…
Bill Vogon? Is that you?
I have no idea what you’re talking about, says the guy who’s been hearing the same “joke” since Star Wars came out in 1977.
Same-ish here. My last name is pronounced the same as that of a Major Nazi, and differs by only 1 letter. Mom always said she wished the SOBs name had been Schmidt instead.
Nah. I have a very German last name. The last two syllables mean “mountain,” and the pronunciation is very close to the word virgin. And it didn’t help that I was batting 0-for-high school in the romance department.
In Canada my first name rhymes perfectly with vagina. I do not not pronounce it that way. Unfortunately, I moved to Canada.
If the duo is the one I’m guessing, and if you were not the straight man, those 10,000 people would shout, ‘Hey, [Stratoooooooh]!’
I worked with a girl who’s name was spelled the same as the capital of Saskatchewan; but she, and everyone else with that name I ever encountered, pronounced it with a long-‘e’.
Or a baseball joke, where you don’t care if someone is playing shortstop.
My late first wife went to law school with a man named Goëring. Who really was a grand nephew some distance removed from the late unlamented head of the wartime Luftwaffe.
Same here, except the Anglicized spelling is exactly the same. While I’ve received some good-natured ribbing about it, my dad, uncles, and grandfather were the targets of sometimes-intense hatred during WWII.
Pronounced with a long ‘e’ everywhere but Canada. I particularly enjoy when it’s shouted out by reception in a doctor’s office.
At least that stupid MF wasn’t in Peru.
Like how only the people from Ohio call their city ‘Lime-uh’ instead of ‘Lee-muh’. (OK, everyone I know pronounces the beans that way.) I wonder if General Aviation pilots in Ohio use the wrong pronunciation? ‘Circleville Unicom, Grumman Five-Eight-Zero-One-LIME-UH…’
Some of my dutch cousins with the last name Ennema emigrated to the US . Eventually they changed it.
Yep, you got it. And to @Johnny_L.A, I’d be the short pudgy guy who sputters like a faulty machine whenever flabbergasted.
Go complain to my old classmate, a woman named Wanda Ball.
In 90s, Toyota had a minivan that was popular in Japan called the Estima Emina. For some reason, it wasn’t marketed under that name in the US.
