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And I would agree. If Prince were to complain, then you'd be free to call him out on it. Personally, I think the griping needs to stop on both sides--the bearers of the unusual names/spellings need to accept they'll be asked repeatedly, others around them need to accept that they'll have to take two minutes to learn something new.
Given that my name, "Shannon", is technically a man's name and I'm female....you can imagine the lack of sympathy you're gonna get from me on that score. (Now cue the inevitable number of people who will say, "What do you mean it's a man's name? The only Shannons I know are all women!")
Sorry, but I'm not with you on regulating names. I agree this leads to what I might find to be stupid choices, but I prefer to err on the side of giving people too much freedom on something this personal.
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Originally Posted by randomparent
That group probably believes Kelly is a female name, too.
Marriage can create some very interesting combinations for young women who choose to adopt a husband's surname.
My last name is easy, but very rare. I ALWAYS have to spell it. And people want to stick extra letters there to make like the ones they know.
And my husband's last name is Campbell... and people screw that up. My first name is Jean. You can't BELIEVE what people do to that.
So spelling out names isn't a good reason not to give them an unusual name.
Regarding the sameness of names.... I do genealogy, and one many greated grandmother named Anna had three sons who then married and named every daughter they had Anna something. add to that they were German, and followed the German custom of when they lost a child the next child of the same sex was named the same name.... so you can have 8 Anna Elizabeths....
The Dutch did the same thing. My grandmother's sister Maria died when she was six years old, and the next baby was a boy, so I had a great-uncle Marinus. Vincent Van Gogh grew up going out to the cemetery every Sunday with his parents to pray at the grave of his brother who died before he was born--so every week he got to stare at a headstone with the name Vincent Van Gogh engraved upon it. Maybe that contributed to his mental state.
Oh, this brings up the ethnic subject- a long time ago there was an Irish (or Irish-American) couple who gave all their kids Irish names, and one was Liam. Their daughter's name was unusual for that period of time, but has become more popular in recent years- I actually had to Google to find out how the name SIOBHAN is pronounced! Would anyone who's not familiar with that name know it's pronounced 'Sha-vaun'?
And when I was a young parent, I had neighbors who named their son Ian- but insisted on pronouncing it "Eye-an" instead of "EE-an." The little boy wasn't yet in kindergarten before they started wondering if they'd made a mistake, because nobody but their family and close friends knew it wasn't pronounced the usual way.
Another friend from those days gave all her kids average names except the youngest. His name was spelled Jerome, but it was pronounced "Her-rome-ay."
I think weird spellings or weird pronunciations give kids a strike against them from the beginning because they and/or their parents always have to explain it.
Parents like those of "EYE-an" and "Her-rome-ay" are very short-sighted. Choosing an unconventional spelling or pronunciation for a name that is nearly always spelled or pronounced a certain other way is doing nothing but setting their kids up for a lifetime of frustration, having to "correct" people about their name when they're the ones whose names were spelled or pronounced "wrong" in the first place. Right or wrong, but some people will even go so far as to dislike the folks with "unusual" names. Why would you want to set your own kid up for that kind of frustration, right from the get-go?
As for Siobhan, she will be doomed to a lifetime of "It's spelled S-I-O-B-H-A-N" and "It's pronounced 'Sha-vaun'," depending on whether she's spelling it for someone who has heard it pronounced or pronouncing it for someone who has seen it spelled.
I actually did know the pronunciation of Siobhan, but only because I'm a fan of BBC television. Honestly, though, anyone named Siobhan in the U.S. is likely to have an Irish brogue, so she'd probably be asked to repeat herself no matter what. It's not exactly a common name here in the Americas.
I also knew an "Eye-an" growing up, so that one doesn't raise an eyebrow for me.
Last edited by randomparent; 06-08-2015 at 09:44 AM..
My friend's daughter is Saoirse (I had to ask about the pronunciation). Her brother is Dylan.
Their grandparents live in Ireland. I see no problem with the names although I am sure that Saoirse will be having to spell and pronounce her name in the US. They visit Ireland for several weeks every summer to see the grandparents and no one there has a problem with her name.
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That group probably believes Kelly is a female name, too.
