Commenter Jaida had a fun idea for a post:<\/p>\n
I wonder if Swistle has ever done a reader poll to see how many readers have difficult-to-pronounce names and how much it bothers them to have to correct people. It seems like something we all worry a lot about as namers but my own experience is that mispronunciation causes a brief moment of embarrassment\/correction and then everyone moves on and there is one more person in the world that knows how to pronounce the name (no shade to anyone more affected by it, I just hope it doesn\u2019t prevent someone from using a name they love!)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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There are two separate baby-naming angles here: one is the tolerance parents have themselves for correcting\/demonstrating the pronunciation of their child’s name, and the other is how people feel about needing to correct their own names. Both are good to consider when naming a child. If I, personally, am a parent who feels cheerful and relaxed about correcting a pronunciation a million times, that’s different than if I, personally, am a parent who clenches my teeth every time. If I clench my teeth every time, I should not do that to myself or to the world.<\/p>\n
But it is also useful to get an idea for how the CHILD (and, of course, the resulting GROWN ADULT) feels about having such a name. It’s not something we can know ahead of time when naming our own personal child—but it seems like it would be useful to have a STATISTICAL feeling about it. That is, are 95% of people with constantly-correct-the-pronunciation names perfectly happy to do it, and only 5% clench their teeth? or is it the other way around? or is it something in between? I can’t do a poll, but I can ask for a voluntary anecdotal offering.<\/p>\n
I have a not-very-difficult-to-pronounce name that is also common in my age group (Kristen), and it still gets mispronounced pretty often: I have learned to respond to Kristine, Kiersten, Kirsten. It is, to me, NOT EVEN REMOTELY a big enough issue to make me wish I’d been named something else—and, based on that experience, I’ve advised parents not to shy away from a name just because it might sometimes be mispronounced. But I had someone on my freshman year college dorm floor named Alysa, pronounced ah-LEE-sah, and 99% of the time she was called either ah-LISS-sah (by people who saw the name without hearing it) or Lisa (by people who heard the name without seeing it). Each time, she would close her eyes, as if praying for patience, and then say through clenched teeth: “It’s ah-LEE-sa.” At some point a name isn’t worth the daily lord-give-me-strength, either for the name-bearer or for anyone else.<\/p>\n
So clearly there are going to be SWATHS of names here, from mispronounced-at-only-a-normal\/tolerable level (like Kristen) to mispronounced-almost-all-the-time (like Alysa), and everything in between and outside, and I think we want to hear from them all. If you are a Lara and people call you Laura; if you are an Andrea and your parents wanted it pronounced on-DRAY-ah; if you are a Mia and people say MEE-ah and MY-ah; if you are a Kati and no one ever knows whether to say it like Katie or like KAH-tee; if you are a Salom\u00e9<\/a> and sometimes people say suh-LOME; if your name is so unfamiliar, you’re accustomed to hearing “Uhhhh…” and knowing they mean you: How much does it bug you? how much does it affect your life? does it make you wish you were named something else, or is it just part of your name and you don’t mind?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Commenter Jaida had a fun idea for a post: I wonder if Swistle has ever done a reader poll to see how many readers have difficult-to-pronounce names and how much it bothers them to have to correct people. It seems like something we all worry a lot about as namers but my own experience is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-4jb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16565"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16565\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16573,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16565\/revisions\/16573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}