The Name’s the Issue by Konnie Enos

Back in mid-September Dear Abby responded to “Making Life Easy”, a father concerned about his wife, who was raised in India, giving their children Indian names. Dear Abby said, among other things, that foreign names are difficult to pronounce and spell and the children would be teased unmercifully.

According to a more recent article on Newser by Rob Quinn this answer created a firestorm with many readers accusing Pauline Phillips, the writer of Dear Abby, of being racist.

If you read through the comments on the Dear Abby site, many of the readers point out easy to pronounce and spell Indian names. One I truly love is Indira, I’ve used it one of my stories. In the same story I have a brother and sister named Aiman and Amita Patel. If any of you can remember the old TV show “Numbers” the pretty female who ended up being the love interest for the leading character was named Amita. I also use the name Sumati in my story.

In the comments on the Dear Abby column one of the other names mentioned is Ravi, which is a totally easy name to spell and pronounce. Then there is my O.B. I readily admit I refuse to try and pronounce his last name. I can say his first name and so far I haven’t run into a single person who didn’t know who Dr. Nadar is.

So spelling and pronouncing some foreign names isn’t impossible.

The other issue was teasing.

When I was in fifth grade several members of our class ended up with nicknames. One girl, whose name was Monica Marsh, was nicknamed Harmonica Marshmallow.  A boy named Scott was called Scotch Tape while one, who had shown up to school one day with a red nose because of the cold and had the unfortunate name of Rudolph was called Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer. My sister and I also got teased unmercifully, but usually, because we’re a pair. I ended up being called Clyde, as in “Bonnie and Clyde”. As you can see having perfectly ordinary European sounding names didn’t get any of us out of being teased.

Of course just saying European names would be much easier to spell is completely overlooking perfectly ordinary names which are either hard to spell or have several different common spellings. Or, like my name, not spelled in a common way.

I could not spell several of my nieces’ and a great-nieces’ names for years, not until my own children were old enough to read and write. They told me how to spell them. Why? Because my husband’s family (it’s his side) just kept telling me to sound it out. I had no clue and the one girl has a perfectly ordinary European name.

I am extremely aware of the fact you will have to spell your name for people regularly if it is unusual or uncommonly spelled.

One of the funniest stories I tell my kids is about the time Bonnie and I and our younger brother went to enroll in our new high school in the town we’d just barely moved too.

The secretary, after establishing we were siblings and new to the area and needed to enroll in school, turned to me and asked me my name. I told her, but did not spell it. She wrote down my first and middle name exactly how she thought they would be spelled then asked how to spell our last name.

 I could see what she had written so after clearly pointing out our last name was two easily spelled four letter words, I said, “You spelled the rest of it wrong.”

By the time she was finished writing our names down she was all but moaning. Our brother’s first name is unusually spelled and, of course, Bonnie’s name matches mine letter for letter other than the initials, so her middle name isn’t spelled how you would expect it to be.

Now my second daughter has a perfectly ordinary first and middle name. There are three, yes I said three, different common ways to spell her first name and two common ways to spell her middle name. Not uncommon, not unusual. They are the normal ways people spell those names.

As one of the commentators on the Dear Abby column put it, “if you don’t know, ask.”

It’s as simple as that.

Beyond that, why can’t parents choose names that mean something to them?

I personally like the name Talitha. It’s an ancestral name and from what my daughter has learned of her story, she was one amazing woman.

Smile. Make the day a brighter day.