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Put an end to people mispronouncing your name

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Re: Put an end to people mispronouncing your name

#61

Post by CodeMage »

shazow wrote: post #46
nat wrote: post #42

I don't think this will help as much as they hope it will. In my experience, people are generally incapable of pronouncing anything, even when it is said to their face. My name is Nat, which is about as simple a name as you could ask for. But quite often, I will introduce myself, "Hi, I'm Nat", and the response will be "Nice to meet you, Nate". My wife experiences it too (even from her mother!), so I don't think my p…

Or even worse: When a barista takes my name for my order, I say "Andrey." Usually they'll spell it "Andre" but whatever. Five minutes later, more often than not, they call out "Aubrey." That's reading their own handwriting. You can't explain that. :P

It can get worse than that ;)

I originally come from Serbia, but I spent the last 14 years in Chile, where most people seemed to choke on my name: Vojislav. When pronounced correctly, it's "voice love", but nobody outside the territory of ex-Yugoslavia knows how to read it correctly.

When it came to buying coffee and stuff like that, I had the choice of explaining my name ad nauseum or adopting an easier one. I decided to call myself "Boris", thanks to telemarketers who would recover from my name by changing it to something they could deal with ;-)

Anyway, that worked quite fine for years and years, until it started failing, ironically at the Starbucks inside a mall with the highest concentration of tourists and immigrants. I would say "Boris" and two times out of five they would write down "Maurice".

The cherry on top inevitable came five minutes later, when a different barista would call out "Mauricio".

Fortunately, I moved before I gave in to temptation to do what a friend of mine did on a regular basis: give "Spongebob" as his name :P

Re: Put an end to people mispronouncing your name

#62

Post by danoprey »

Fuzzwah wrote: post #57
nat wrote: post #42

I don't think this will help as much as they hope it will. In my experience, people are generally incapable of pronouncing anything, even when it is said to their face. My name is Nat, which is about as simple a name as you could ask for. But quite often, I will introduce myself, "Hi, I'm Nat", and the response will be "Nice to meet you, Nate". My wife experiences it too (even from her mother!), so I don't think my p…

I'm an Aussie living in the US. My name is Rob. Basically every American calls me Raaaab.

I'm British and in the US I have to deliberately say "Daaayn" so as not to be called Don.

Re: Put an end to people mispronouncing your name

#63

Post by x1798DE »

xienze wrote: post #58
x1798DE wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm even very forgiving of this. In America, I feel like every name has a few different variants, especially anything that had to be transliterated from another character set (even the German name Müller comes through sometimes as Mueller and sometimes as Muller). Because they're so often some Anglicized version of some foreign name, it's hard to have an intuition about the right way to spell many names - even someth…

Well, in my case, my first name is fairly common, it just has a letter repeated that normally isn't. So, it's not some unusual, foreign name.

Well, even common names have many variants floating around, that's the point. I tend to cut people slack on things like names given that I can never remember how to spell things like commitment (two ms? two ts? both?!) without a spellchecker getting my back.

Re: Put an end to people mispronouncing your name

#64

Post by CocaKoala »

PeterGriffin wrote: post #60
CocaKoala wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of a name is so that people have an easy way to refer to you; so what? The point of anything is purely utilitarian, and people still get attached to them. I got a cat so that I wouldn't feel as lonely when my housemates went on long trips; that doesn't mean that after taking care of her for four years I'd be happy swapping my cat for a different one, even though they might be functionally identical as far a…

Please don't compare one's attachment to another living being (like a cat) to attachment to objects, or even worse, intangible symbols (like a name). A tendency to apply high value to symbols, instead of substance is a property I've noticed in less sophisticated people. They can't tell (or weren't taught to tell) apart symbol and substance, but symbols are way simpler, so they focus on the symbols. Works for them to…

>A tendency to apply high value to symbols, instead of substance is a property I've noticed in less sophisticated people.

This is a wonderful sentence. I recently got married, and I wouldn't trade my wedding ring for ten times the gold value in cash, because I cherish it as a symbol of my commitment to my wife, and a symbol of our love for each other. Does that make me "less sophisticated" than somebody who looks at their wedding ring and says "Gold prices are up from when we got married; let's cash this sucker in and make some profit"?

Am I stupid for not doing that? Is it silly that I cherish my wedding ring more than somebody on the street, because to me it's a symbol of my marriage and to them it's just my ring?

It's fine if you want to adopt an utterly robotic and value-driven outlook on life, but it's silly to expect everybody else to do the same, and it's ridiculous to say that people who refuse to be similarly robotic are somehow "less sophisticated" than your utterly logical and enlightened self.

edit: you keep on pointing out how you do X, like how you've shortened your name, or you were named for your grandfather, and I guess I don't understand why because it doesn't matter. What you choose to do doesn't have that much of a bearing on what other people choose to do, and just because you're willing to change your name doesn't mean other people should have to.

Re: Put an end to people mispronouncing your name

#65

Post by ahomescu1 »

shazow wrote: post #46
nat wrote: post #42

I don't think this will help as much as they hope it will. In my experience, people are generally incapable of pronouncing anything, even when it is said to their face. My name is Nat, which is about as simple a name as you could ask for. But quite often, I will introduce myself, "Hi, I'm Nat", and the response will be "Nice to meet you, Nate". My wife experiences it too (even from her mother!), so I don't think my p…

Or even worse: When a barista takes my name for my order, I say "Andrey." Usually they'll spell it "Andre" but whatever. Five minutes later, more often than not, they call out "Aubrey." That's reading their own handwriting. You can't explain that. :P

Worst I've got was "Avery" (instead of Andrei).

Re: Put an end to people mispronouncing your name

#66

Post by HorizonXP »

johngalt wrote: post #27
HorizonXP wrote: post #25

I will never expect anyone to pronounce my legal first name, Xitij.

Zih-tidge is my guess.

Close. Kshee-teej, where the 't' is a soft 't' sound, almost like in the word 'thumb'. Hard to explain since English doesn't make distinctions between how consonants can sound.

Re: Put an end to people mispronouncing your name

#67

Post by keerthiko »

shazow wrote: post #46
nat wrote: post #42

I don't think this will help as much as they hope it will. In my experience, people are generally incapable of pronouncing anything, even when it is said to their face. My name is Nat, which is about as simple a name as you could ask for. But quite often, I will introduce myself, "Hi, I'm Nat", and the response will be "Nice to meet you, Nate". My wife experiences it too (even from her mother!), so I don't think my p…

Or even worse: When a barista takes my name for my order, I say "Andrey." Usually they'll spell it "Andre" but whatever. Five minutes later, more often than not, they call out "Aubrey." That's reading their own handwriting. You can't explain that. :P

There's a conspiracy theory that Starbucks and other large cafe chains intentionally misspell names, so that the customer will take a picture and facebook/instagram it, as free advertising for the place.

If it isn't true, it certainly should be. If I opened a coffee shop tomorrow, I would instruct all my baristas to misspell the customer names for this reason.

Re: Put an end to people mispronouncing your name

#68

Post by obvio »

shazow wrote: post #46
nat wrote: post #42

I don't think this will help as much as they hope it will. In my experience, people are generally incapable of pronouncing anything, even when it is said to their face. My name is Nat, which is about as simple a name as you could ask for. But quite often, I will introduce myself, "Hi, I'm Nat", and the response will be "Nice to meet you, Nate". My wife experiences it too (even from her mother!), so I don't think my p…

Or even worse: When a barista takes my name for my order, I say "Andrey." Usually they'll spell it "Andre" but whatever. Five minutes later, more often than not, they call out "Aubrey." That's reading their own handwriting. You can't explain that. :P

I just use a pseudonym which is unmistakable, usually a really local name that even though my accent isn't perfect they'll be able to understand it!

Re: Put an end to people mispronouncing your name

#70

Post by pavel_lishin »

CocaKoala wrote: post #36
mattzito wrote: post #7

Yeah, I think it's a clever concept, but it seems almost egotistical to say, "Look, I care enough about how you pronounce my last name to embed a link in my email sig " Many people classically mispronounced my name - it's not a big deal, I move on. If we're not going to be having many conversations where you say my last name, I'm not even going to correct you.

I dunno; as somebody who's name gets mispronounced essentially all the time, I'm pretty sensitive about trying to pronounce other people's names properly. If they embed the pronunciation in their email, then a) I don't have to ask, and b) I can practice on my own time with a reference to make sure I have it correct. It's nice of them.

My name gets mispronounced, too, and I'm fine with it - I actually prefer the incorrectly pronounced version of my name.

It has taught me, though, that when someone tells you "you can just call me X", you should not keep asking them how to really pronounce their name. If you're an American, you are not going to be able to fluently pronounce some non-Indo-European names. It's downright rude to quiz people for minutes on end as to how their name is "really" pronounced. If you don't get it on the second try, just go with what they're comfortable with.

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