My mother’s name is Gay. People apparently have a hard time believing this and 9 times out of 10 will spell it Gaye. It drives her nuts.
My first name is Carol. Aside from people calling me Caroline, I’ve only ever had trouble with people misspelling my name as Carole until just recently, when a whole bunch of unrelated people and companies have begun addressing me as “Coral”. Not just a misspelling - a completely different name.
Kittenblue, I am surprised you had trouble with that one. Caitlyn and the thousand spelling variations of the same name are quite common these days, where Cat-Lyn is decidedly uncommon. I would have assumed that Katlin was Kate-Lynn as spelt by someone with a flimsy grasp of phonetics. The original Irish name was actually pronounced more like Kathleen.
If they’re from the South, Ian goes to Ee-in goes to Een quicker than a … a … well, real quick. Please be patient, they’re talking the best that they can.
And there are a mess of Scots in the North Carolina in the Piedmont and Appalachia areas.
Well, I can understand them spelling your name ‘Arg,’ the way it sounds.
You have over three thousand posts on this board of perfectionists and sadists; and, in a post decrying how common misspellings are, you code wrong and misspell ‘mispell.’
Are you a masochist? Are you begging to be made fun of?
Go search “Gaudere’s Law”.
Aaargh, I hear you.
I’ve got a long name. It never fits on computer forms. I’ve had teachers (yes, up through my SENIOR YEAR IN HIGH SCHOOL) try to correct me on the spelling of my own name. “There’s no ‘e’ at the end.” “Yes, there is. It’s just not on that paper.” “Are you sure?” :smack:
I’ve got a long, hyphenated last name (thanks, mom and dad…). I attend a college where EVERY class is under 20 people, discussion based, and everyone (student and professors alike) is addressed as “Mr./Ms/Mrs lastname”. On the first day, I decided that I was tired of people stumbling and getting my name wrong. I’m just going with the short, simple, not-as-ethnic first half of it.
One of my professors refuses to use the shortened form. Despite my repeated requests. :smack:
My first name is Robin. Not Robyn. It drived me nuts people spell it wrong, and when corrected tell me “but that’s the guy’s way to spell it and your a girl”. I think that after 26 years, I’m pretty good at spelling my own name.
Or I get email addressed to Mr. Robin <last name>.
It doesn’t help that my middle name is Lee - also entirely non gender specific.
My last name is hard enough that people don’t even try guessing - they just ask. They always pronounce it wrong though.
To me, spelling someone’s name wrong is just plain rude. It shows that you don’t respect them enough to find out how to spell it and then make the effort to get it right. Getting it wrong once is OK - a genuine mistake, more than once, and you’re rude.
[QUOTE=robinc308To me, spelling someone’s name wrong is just plain rude. It shows that you don’t respect them enough to find out how to spell it and then make the effort to get it right. Getting it wrong once is OK - a genuine mistake, more than once, and you’re rude.[/QUOTE]
Not just rude, Robin, sometimes quite deliberate to put you down by reminding you that you don’t really count.
My surname is so difficult to spell (or pronounce) that an ancient aunt actually wrote a poem about it, called “To Ecclesiastics and Others in Doubt” (no idea why). I still remember the first line:
“It is so easy, think of TRY and just reverse the R and Y”
I feel your pain, but something must be done about the people who name their kids with “original” spellings.
Sheesh, I work with a Sean, a Shawn, and a Shaun, and sometimes I just don’t remember which one is which.
I’ve also known a Chandra, a Chaundra, a Shaundra, …
At least I don’t know anyone who spells it Cian, but I’m sure that’s right around the corner.
Go ahead and do it. My first name is Betsey, but at one place I worked, one woman just couldn’t seem to grasp that name, and kept calling me “Becky.”
I corrected her the first few days, then gave up and just refused to respond to her when she called me Becky. After all, it’s not my name, right?
One day I heard her calling to me (well, she was calling ‘Becky’), and I just didn’t turn around or acknowledge her at all. She had to walk over to me, tap me on the shoulder and got all huffy about it. She asked why I didn’t respond to her, and I played innocent and said, “Oh, I didn’t realize you were talking to me. You were saying ‘Becky,’ and my name’s Betsey, remember?”
She always got it right after that.
I know exactly how you feel. I’ve had my name spelled Ronee, Renae, Rena, Randy, Wendy, Lindsey, Britney and Elizabeth (okay, that one was a “mispronunciation” rather than a misspelling…but it’s still not even close). This is why I choose not to use my real first name anywhere that I can help it.
This is all well and good
BUT
do any of you have relatives who cannot spell part of your name that is a part of their family history? Not a bastardized/Americanized/otherwise-changed name, either. Straight from the Irish.
My last name is a beast unto itself. It used to be that I could judge spam from non-spam based solely on name misspellings. Now, however, I have credit cards without my actual name on them. There have also been times when it was not possible to communicate the family last name, so we used something easier (pizza company and dry cleaners knew us as Murphy for over ten years, which made hunting for my sport coat fun the one time we used the actual last name).
These days I just whip out a form of ID if people ask me my name.
Actually, it’s pronounced ‘Throat-warbler Mangrove’
Marley. Yes, there’s an e, no, it’s not spelled M-A-R-V-I-N (I’m not from Mars) or M-A-R-L-O-N (I’m not a Wayans brother). Since neither of those is pronounced like my name in the first place, I’m not sure why there’s such confusion sometimes.
To be fair, certain misspellings are very common when giving names over the phone (like l-e-y instead of l-y for example), which is why the person taking down the name should repeat it back to make sure. This doesn’t excuse repeated mistakes of course.
Is this the right room for a rant? Good.
My name is Ralph, yes that is a silent L, English has many silent letters, why does this one cause you so many problems? I realise that it’s not phoenetic and I’m happy to correct you (very politely) a few times on first meeting you, that’s fine. If however after knowing me for several years you still can’t get it right, I’m going to get a little irritated.
And no, Mr Idiot in the meeting, “That’s an awfully pretentious name” does not constitute an appropriate response to my introduction. (I’ve had that happen, unfortunately with a client so I had to be nice).
I like my name, it means “Counsel Wolf”. I don’t like discourteous idiots.
Poor example for the trend of ‘new’ spellings. Sean and Shaun both derive from Hebrew (with the same origin as Eoin, John, Owen, Johann, Owain, Hans, …), and Cian’s a different name entirely, coming from Old Irish.
My ex-girlfriends name is Erin. People often think it’s Aaron, despite the fact that she is very noticeably not a man. Evidently, people are idiots.
I hate hate hate hate hate you. (Well, not really, but I did as a child.)
I’m the Sara without the H, and nobody ever ever spells it that way first. Can we switch? I always have to fight them to take the thing off! The only people who ever ask “with an H or without?” are other Saras. And if I say “Sara without the H” or “Sara with an A” it’s like they totally don’t register that I said anything, I guess because their brains aren’t on “spell it” yet.
Hee hee…I just tried Googling ‘sahra’, and the first three results are:
“SAHRA - Sustainability of semi-Arid Hydrology and Riparian Areas”
“SAHRA - Sacramento Area Human Resources Association”
“SAHRA - South African Heritage Resources Agency”
Oh, and the necessary “Did you mean: sarah”
(Although to be fair, Sahra is also a valid Arabic name)