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.

Names

I quite recently read several things about names. I have to tell you, I’ve had some people tell me I’m too touchy on this topic.

I once asked someone how to spell the name of a relative, I was told, “it’s just a name, sound it out.”

I’m sorry, it’s not “just a name”, it is that person’s moniker. It is part of who that person is. I might be more of a stickler than most about how my name is spelled, but I have reason to be.

One of my earliest school memories evolves a teacher telling me, several times I was spelling my name wrong, which I repeatedly refuted. She finally looked at me quite sternly and said, “You’re Bryon’s sister aren’t you?”

I’d like to point out that is exactly how my brother spells Brian. So yes, both of us have common names spelled exceptionally.

The teacher decided to let me spell Connie, with a K. Then she turned to Bonnie and asked, “How do you spell your name?”

Of course we thought she was crazy. How else are you going to spell Bonnie?

Mind you, we were five at the time.

In high school I had an experience where someone needed to write my name down and didn’t bother to ask me how to spell my rather common sounding first or middle name, but then did ask how to spell my last name.

I’d like to point out that our maiden name was a combination of two simple four letter words. I replied. “Just like it sounds,” I repeated it for emphasis. “You spelled the rest of it wrong.”

I then had to explain how she misspelled my first and middle names. She also had to write down my brother’s and Bonnie’s names, leaving her to believe our whole family had weirdly spelled names. (Only Bryon’s first name and Bonnie’s middle name, and no, just us three, in our whole family.)

Now, as an older woman, and aspiring author, I’d seriously looked at the notion of a pen name, but was told in a nutshell, why monkey with something as memorable as what I already have.

As a young adult, a group I belonged to made a phone list that listed everyone’s name with their nickname. Each listing read: first name “nickname” last name. Mine read: Konnie “Konnie with a K” then my last name. Even after I moved out my Dad got phone calls asking for “Konnie with a K”.

I also have another reason to stress how my name is spelled. “C” Connie Enos, is the wife of my husband’s younger brother. I tell people if they spell my name incorrectly they have my kids’ aunt, not me.

But as I think about how names are spelled, I wonder about how our characters feel about it. How my name is spelled is part of who I am. I find it rude to misspell it, when it’s intentional or done repeatedly. I do understand mistakes. But as strongly as I feel about my name, I’ve never written a character with the same intense feelings nor have I had any problems with changing a character’s name as a story progressed. Then again, I’ve never written a story with a character who had a name that was unusual or spelled in a surprising way.

What do you think about names, and how they affect characters attitudes?

Smile. Make the day a brighter day.

The Name Thing

Not long ago my middle daughter and I were having a conversation and it somehow got on names.

Something prompted me to mention the calendar my father had listing everyone’s birthdays. The calendar had twelve squares, one for each month. In each Dad listed family members birthday by the day they were born, their first name and then the two digit year they were born. However, my middle daughter and my brother’s oldest daughter were born a month and a day apart and have the exact same first name.

 Dad’s solutions was to add their middle initial to the board.

When I saw it, and read the entries for those girls’ birthdays, I had to laugh. “Dad you should have used their last initial.”

This was obvious to me since those are clearly different whereas their middle initials are the same, even if they are different names. The way Dad did it, made it look like he listed two birthdays for one girl.

Anyway that story led me to retell how her cousin hadn’t known, when they were in grade school, that they had the same name. We had as a rule used a common nickname for our daughter but my brother refused to shorten any of his kid’s names. So one day, in my niece’s presence, when I was a bit irked with my own daughter and called her by her full first name, I had to explain that they had the same name.

This discussion led to us talking about how moms call kids full names when they are upset with their kids. I told my daughter that I tend to use my children’s first and middle names when I’m mad, for all but my youngest daughter. I use her first two names when I’m in a good mood.

“That’s not fair. Why do you do that?”

 “You try saying Joy when you’re mad.”

I let her think on that a moment.

I finally pointed out. “When I’m mad at her she gets her full name, not just her first and middle name.”

Truthfully, I have used my other kids full names, but generally the first two are enough for them to know they are in trouble.

But as my youngest daughter read this, she pointed out that I rarely call her by just her first name.

She’s right. I do usually use her first two names. Either that, or her nickname, which I often pair with her middle name anyway.

I really like her middle name.

Can you blame me?