Things I Hate: Needlessly Misspelled Names

Names are always a good conversation topic. Doesn't matter who you're talking to -- you can always eat up about half an hour talking about names. But lately, I've noticed that the typical conversation pattern of "I like this name, I don't like this name" has given way to "I know this one woman who has the stupidest name ..."

It's an epidemic, America. It's an epidemic wrapped in crisis and smothered with panic sauce. You are getting worse and worse at naming your children.

There are many ways you can go with stupid names. You can choose a trendy name like Madison or Jordan or Colby or Chase or Dakota. That's annoying, but you can hardly get too upset about that -- partially because it's not exactly considered acceptable to scream at poorly named 3-year-olds in the mall, but mostly because you have to save your precious anger energy for the true affront to all that is good and holy: the needlessly misspelled name.

According to my exhaustive studies, the problem with needlessly misspelled names began about 30 years ago or so. I've now met two 30-ish people where I work (let's call it FLaw), both with needlessly misspelled names.

Actually, I've seen many others since then, but these two were especially outstanding. See, most of the time, the needlessly mispelled names take the form of a "Jordin" instead of "Jordan," a "Chrystyne" instead of "Christine," a "DjawsufffffFFFF" instead of "Joseph." They're annoying, lame attempts to be different, to be sure, but at least you can sort of tell what name they were trying to go for.

Not so for my FLaw co-worker Jacque. Looks normal enough, right? Except that it's pronounced "Jackie," and it's a woman. Sigh. What the hell's the point of that? Presumably, her full name is Jacqueline. Why would you abbreviate that into a different name entirely, but pronounce it like the conventional nickname for Jacqueline? If that's the way it works, fine, then I'm going to call my kid "Andrew" and then "And" for short. It's pronounced "Andy," but spelled "And." Meet my kid And.

This kind of thing accomplishes nothing, besides a lifetime off frustration for the name-holder. Jacque seems like a very nice person, and I'm sure she's sick to death of having the same conversation about her name every time she meets someone now. "Yes, I know it looks like I'm a French guy. But it's pronounced 'Jackie.' Yes, I know my parents were idiots."

That one's baffling, but I'm not sure it's extremely pretentious. I usually have a pretty finely tuned pretenti-o-meter, and Jacque's name scores a little bit of pretension just because it sounds French (anything French is a little bit pretentious by definition), but it's mostly just confusing.

The next one, though, blows Jacque out of the water as far as pretentio-goodness. When I heard this one, my pretent-o-meter started spinning around and smoking. It's pretentious with a capital P, plus a capital R, capital E, capital T, and so forth.

There was this woman at FLaw who spelled her name "Kristen." So people, perhaps foolishly, figured her name was "Kristen." But she was always very quick to correct us -- "It's actually pronounced 'Shisteen.'" Say what?

"Shisteen" out of "Kristen"? You're shisting me. No, it's true. And when I heard that she adopted that pronunciation in college (the time when most insufferably pretentious things occur), because she felt it was more accurate as far as how they pronounce it in Norway or Denmark or Tajikistan or Ohio or wherever her family comes from originally -- wow. That takes big brass balls of glistening pretension.

Now, I'm all for being proud of your heritage. But not if it means punishing everyone you meet in the process with a needlessly difficult name. You see, Shisteen, in America we have this system by which certain words and letters correspond with certain sounds. It's efficient, it's well-accepted, and it generally keeps the wheels of commerce turning. We don't really have a good reason to change it. The fact that your ancestors had a different system doesn't exactly cut it.

I guess I feel especially strong about this because my last name is so difficult. But I didn't choose it; I just have to live with it. I have to take ten minutes spelling it out very carefully to every customer-service rep I meet. If I could just be a nice, anonymous "Smith" I probably could've saved hundreds of hours per year. I then could have used those hours to write a book called "The Secret to Happiness: Simple Names" and already become fabulously wealthy. But no -- instead I'm doomed to spend my days yelling to people over the phone "No, 'E' as in egg! Egg!"

And then to see someone who had a normal name and then gave it up for a difficult one -- it's like living your life with only one eye and then meeting someone who intentionally gouged their eye out. "What the hell are you doing?" I would say. "You were living the dream and you chose the nightmare!"

Maybe she actually enjoys those long conversations where you have to correct people about the pronunciation of your name. Maybe she savors the words "No, it's actually pronounced ..." as they come tripping off her tongue.

Whether she did it for fun or not, when she changed the pronunciation of her name, she made a strong, binding, lifelong commitment to being a pretentious smart-ass. Some people adopt a pretentious accent, or wear a pretentious wardrobe, or work hard to cultivate an attitude of intellectual superiority. Those people look like amateurs compared to our friend Kristen/Shisteen. Putting pretension is your very name -- you don't get any more committed than that.

Who knows, maybe I doth protest too much. Perhaps I'm just jealous of people like Shisteen who are able to commit themselves to a lifelong mission. Maybe I should change my name to "Bob" and then tell people "it's actually pronounced 'OO-arr-WACK-Zeeble-boo!'" It's the traditional Latvian pronunciation, idiot. Geez.