Quit mispronouncing my name..grrr...

 my last name is butchered all the time by telemarketers. like someone else said though... i always know right away that it is someone i dont want to talk to when i hear it pronounced incorrectly. :)

I feel your frustration with this one.  My name may be long and not very common, but it's said the exact way it is spelled....GeorgAnne.  Unfortuneately my parents put that capital A in the middle so I think that is part of the problem.  I get Georganna, georgine, and don't even get me started on how people spell it (although I can understand the issue there to a point).

I recently filled out a form online and I typed in "GeorgAnne" under first name along with last name and SS#.  This form was for teaching...for my Child Abuse Clearance form (to prove that I don't abuse kids) and the form is looked at and my record, or lack thereof is looked up and they send me a certificate so I can send the certificate off with my applications to schools.  Well, I get the certificate and it was for a "Georg A Hoffman".

Absolutely nothing about my name was right!!  My last name wasn't even spelled right.  It was filled out online so it wasn't an issue of reading my handwriting.  I just don't get how that happens... 

I named my daughter with the french spelling of Madeleine.  The end is pronounced like "Lynn".  The storybook about the little girl is spelled Madeline and pronounced "line" at the end.  Nobody gets the pronunciation or the spelling right.  She shortened it and goes by Mady which I hate!  I gave her a beautiful pretty name for a reason!  Our last name is always mispronounced and misspelled.  My dry cleaning always ends up somewhere else!  

My first and last name have always been easy for people to pronounce.  However, growing up, anyone that was family or knew me well call me by my nick name.  Boney Jean.  That one is ALWAY butchered and when it isn't butchered, it was changed to Boner or anything else not so tasteful that people could come up with.  People who don't know it is pronounced Bone-e will say Bonnie and even on here people call me Jean sometimes.  Fortunately I have never really cared.  My dad always had so many nicknames for all of us that what was another one.  We joke that all of us have an identity crisis b/c of it! 

I am facing this issue a little with our baby though.  We are naming her Devin which is more commonly known as a boys name.  So we decided we will pick out a obvious girl name for the middle name but of course the one I like is also androgynous and could also be a boys name.  I can't imagine how people will pronounce and mispell her name and hopefully she doesn't hate us for it.  Hopefully she will like having a name that isn't unheard of but also isn't as widely used for a girls name.

 Oh, and I have a friend who is named Natasha.  I have always pronounced it as Nat-O-sha which I think it how I have always heard it even when she told me her name.  She never corrected me or told me differently and everyone we worked with pronounced it that way too.  A couple years later, her childhood friends point out everytime I see them how it is Nat-A-sha and that is how her mom wanted it.  They don't have a lot of class anyway with the way they address it, but I changed the way I say it now and I swear I feel like I am mocking it as well b/c it just doesn't sound right to me.  But if that is how her momma wanted it then that is how I will say it.  She has told me she doesn't care either way.   

Well, my name isn't hard to figure out...but i hate it when people pronounce it "May-gen". lol. I also hate it when people try to spell it meaghan. But, i do realize there are people who spell it like that. Don't even get me started on my last name...it's like a 25% chance someone can pronounce it right! 

I'm Kimberly. That is what I tell people when I meet them. And in the end I get called Kim. Can you not get my whole name out of your mouth?!!! Is it that much trouble?!!!

When I found out I was having a girl I knew I wanted to call her Samantha. But I seriously thought about giving her simple name that there was no way you could shorten it. I did not want people calling her Sam or Sammy. Now if she chooses to be called Sam/Sammy later then fine but only by her choice. The other day at the store we ran into a lady we knew. She asked "Sam" how she was doing. Samantha looked at her and said "I'm Samantha!!"

I would not have expected Leslie to be a problem.  I had a friend in high school that wrote on a birthday card, Lezzle.  There's no Z in LeSlie, yet people always say Lezlie, so I can understand the misspelling.  But please, it's LeSlie.  And my last name is 3 letters long.  The biggest problem I have is that they want to look in the M's instead of the E's.    Oh well. 

I know that pain! My name isn't even that hard but teachers seemed to think that my own parents didn't know my name. It's Amber.. Not that hard but ever since I started elementary school, and it still continues and I'll be 23 in a few weeks, EVERYBODY thought my name was Amanda. Even if I wrote my name on a test, they'd hand it back and say my name was wrong. .*sigh*

And my last name.. Oh boy.. My last name was changed in the 20's (thank god!) but it still a pretty common name around here. Phillips.. Not that hard to spell but I've seen it with F and one L.. And all through high school I was always saying "NO! I am not related to him just cuz we have the same name..."

I'm Amy Bunch.  Really, the simplest name EVER but I have to spell my last name every single time.  "Burch?  Bun?  Bush?  Butch?"  Seriously?  It's Bunch, like a bunch of grapes.  Sister and I were the Brady Bunch in grade school.  I've also had someone ask me if Amy is short for something.  Such as??  Sheesh, people need to clean out their ears and listen!

My girls were raised Anderson-Clark.... It seemed simple to us,  the X was a jerk and the girls only wanted a nodding aqauintance with the family name.  That was never a problem the school and drs offices who could never figure out if it was filed und "A" or "C" killed me!!

Bonita of Bwana

I named DS #1 "Sean" but it wasn't that common back  then and people constantly pronounced it "seen." Some people even made it into  two syllables and called him"see ann." My MIL actually thought we had named him "Swan" because we lived at the beach.  Go figure.  DS #2 is "Liam" (leeum) which is Irish for William but people pretty much butchered that one, too.  He gets junk mail addressed to Lima, Laim, LeeAnn, etc. and the "I don't want to talk to you" phone callers often ask for Lie-Am.

Joyce

Liam is one of my favorite names ever. A teacher at my school named his first child William and calls him Liam, which isn't quite as cool as just being named Liam.

I get all "Warner" all the time. Even when I spell Warren for them. My other names are really easy to spell. I once went out with a friend of mine and gave them her last name instead of mine because it was easier. The end result of her butchered name... "Tumass" ... her actual last name? Moss.

I have another friend who's German and his middle name is Manfred. Which isn't pronounced "man-fred" like my friends like to say, but  more like "mann-fret". I love his names. German names are very popular for the mispronunciation. Like Kleine-Jaeger.

LOL, well I'm kinda glad that other people feel my pain, but now I'm annoyed for all of you.

Here's something funny. None of my sisters have terribly rare names either, but all four of us get our names butchered. Colleen gets "Coh-leen" or "Cuh-leen" when really it's "CAH-leen", Suzi's name is Suzanne (which is also our Mom's name), so she of course gets Susan a lot, or Suzi gets spelled wrong.. Susy, Suzy, Suzie, Susie...sheesh. And Sarah has the commonest name of all, but people CONSTANTLY leave off the h. Even a few of our very close first cousins spell it Sara.

But sheesh, I'm glad I don't have an ACTUALLY rare name. Alleen is a family name, it's my grandmother's, my aunt's, and my cousin's daughter's. They get called Allen, Aileen, Ali (with the emphasis on the second syllable, as in Mohammed), and various other silly mispronunciations. For the record, it's Al-LEEN, like Allen but with a long E sound, and the emphasis on the second syllable.

When my cousin was naming her baby Thomas, her husband wanted to spell it Tomas just to be a little different. Yeah, and have him called toh-MAS his whole life?? (we ARE in southern California!) Cripes.

Meanwhile, everyone say a little prayer for my impending niece or nephew, because the sister who's pregnant (Suzi) is notorious for wanting to be different and liking bizarre names. You'd think after being called Susan her whole life, she'd know better, but nooo... She's already talking about if it's a boy naming him Winter, but no doubt spelled Wyntur or something weird.

chelsea_b

I really don't understand. I don't have a rare name. In fact, it's pretty common as of late. And you'd think since it was the First Daughter's (is that what she's called?) for 8 years, not to mention the name of a fairly famous part of London, a city in Massachusetts, an area of NYC, etc....people would know how to pronounce it? But nope. I'd say about...a third of the time someone reads my name, they pronounce is Chel-SEE-uh.

This really surprises me, because an ex-colleague of mine has a daughter and her name is SPELT like yours, but they pronounce it with a hard C, (as in cat).  But it's spelt just like yours!  So I thought that would be the mis-pronunciation that bugs you.  She gets called CHELSEA (the "right" way to say your name) ALL the time.  It's very frustrating for her!

No one could ever spell or pronounce my former last name.  I didn't mind.  But then, I like to be different.  And yeah, it does mean you get to pick out the cold callers real quick