My favourite pretentious names are those I read in a newspaper profile of a graphic designer, who had named his three daughters Perpetua, Helvetica and Clarendon.
This was a few years ago, so they may well have welcomed little Comicsans into the world by now.
Came across this relevant article today:
They couldn’t believe it when she was born.
Do merry and Mary sound really different to you? Because while I can hear the difference in someone who pronounces them differently, they seem pretty similar.
Now marry is completely different. Harry Potter sounds completely different from the guy who left some hair in my clay pots. (a hairy potter).
They sound totally different to me. Not just when someone’s enunciating clearly, but in any casual conversation.
There is a comic song called Mary Mack based on the subtle difference in pronunciation of marry, Mary and merry. Sung fast, as it usually is, it is a bit of a tongue-twister.
Just so you will have seen the proper pronunciation of Mary, note that it’s Mayreh!
Very true. I met a pasty-white woman one day and was a bit puzzled at how hard she was struggling with English. I couldn’t quite place her accent, and suspected that she might be a French speaker (we get a lot of French Canadian tourists here - busloads and busloads every summer). It turns out that she was from El Salvador!
Depends on who is speaking. I my dialect, they sound exactly the same, because I’m not taking any effort to make any distinction.
Hairy and Harry are exactly the same word.
Now I can hear someone pronounce merry, Mary, and marry differently if in their dialect they are pronounced differently, and I mentally map them okay.
Vowels are evil things.
Legend and not fact. Ima Hogg is a real person, the daughter of Jim Hogg an Attorney General of Texas. She was born in 1882 and lived to be 93. She had no sisters only brothers and was never married. There was no Ura.
Yes, they’re similar but they are different enough that I can hear it, and my mouth is shaped differently when I say one versus the other.
Merry is like Meh, yell, yep.
Mary is pear, tare, care.
I have a friend from Ohio who says them all the same. For years she would refer to what I thought was her friend Kerry and finally it comes out it’s her friend Carrie. Totally different! A Carrie has a different personality from a Kerry. 
I wanted to name my kid after one of the twelve apostles (Mathew Mark Luke John Peter Simon Judas BArt), because those names are normal in any european country, or in an country that was a european colony.
But when I google my Dad’s full nsme, using “quotes”, I get 990,000 hits. My name is probably on a “no-fly” list just by default. My brother got stopped at an airport because he was on an FBI wanted list. It took them an hour and a half to decide that if he was a local criminal, he probably wouldn’t be flying in from Aus. And that he isn’t black.
I comprimised with a less common name for my kid. But I totally understand the desire to have an unusual name, or an unusual spelling. And if I thought I was normally being treated as a member of a group or a block, I imagine I’d be even more attracted to the idea of having a unique name.
I don’t know if this has been posted here, but I find it endlessly fascinating. When I enter my given name, it makes a huge spike/bulge right at 1955, my birth year. My chosen name, however, maintains a steady low popularity through the years.
Heh – Tiffany doesn’t show up till the 50s and peaks in the 70s. That was my dream name when I was little. 
Harry/Hairy
Grew up in Chicago. Never made a distinction between the two pronunciation-wise; can hear it but feel like a fool trying to produce it. Went east to college. Discovered that lots of people in the east make a distinction.
My sister is three years younger. Also went east to college. Brought with her a large stuffed frog. Its name was “Harry.” I said, “I guarantee you that within three weeks someone will come into your room and say, ‘What’s the frog’s name?’ You will say, ‘Harry.’ The other person will say, ‘But frogs don’t have any hair.’”
“Har har,” she said.
“Trust me,” I said.
Two weeks after she moves in, I get a call. “Guess what,” she says. “You were right; it’s happened twice already!”
An april fools joke on the news once when I was a kid was that names with æ, ø and å were now off limits for naming your kid. This is the first time I’ve encountered someone holding that opinion for real.
The problems my name being unspellable in English have caused me are barely worth mentioning, the benefits are too many to mention.
Signed Bjørnar aka Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Alphabet (knight of alt.fan.monty-python)
PS I’m gonna name my first son Odd Even, perfectly good Norwegian names, and likely a good way to encourage an illustrious career in mathematics.
In-show, River pointed out this interpretation of the name Mal.
Yeah, I’ve never been a fan of the name/nickname “Mal” because I come from a French-speaking area and I know what it means in French.
The other day I met a woman named Mylove. Did her parents like Paul McCartney?