Name stuff
Jun. 8th, 2017 10:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lovingbothI can remember being pleased to have 'Ian' as a name when I was in infant school: it was very easy to spell and I was not good at spelling.
Hardly anyone gets it wrong. An occasional extra 'i' gets added, especially if they know I have Scottish heritage, but not very often. Even with that, it's still basically pronounced the same.
My surname on the other hand...
... I can remember loudly correcting the deputy head at my secondary school when he got it wrong during an assembly of some sort while I was in the upper sixth form. I'd only been there six years, FFS, he'd been there throughout that time, and there were only about 250 pupils left at that point.*
I am also forever having to spell it out on the phone etc.
Interestingly, Newark is somewhere where this hardly ever happens. It almost certainly helps that a prominent local vet practice is Newman Watters. Their site is by one of the main roads, so anyone coming into town from the northbound A1 sees it.
Fortunately, I am much more attached to my first name than my surname. It was easy for me to agree for JA to take L's surname for example.
* It was a three class per year, i.e about 90 pupils, grammar school that was being converted into the local sixth form college as part of going comprehensive. The year that was two below us was the last grammar school intake, and some will have left at 16.
Hardly anyone gets it wrong. An occasional extra 'i' gets added, especially if they know I have Scottish heritage, but not very often. Even with that, it's still basically pronounced the same.
My surname on the other hand...
... I can remember loudly correcting the deputy head at my secondary school when he got it wrong during an assembly of some sort while I was in the upper sixth form. I'd only been there six years, FFS, he'd been there throughout that time, and there were only about 250 pupils left at that point.*
I am also forever having to spell it out on the phone etc.
Interestingly, Newark is somewhere where this hardly ever happens. It almost certainly helps that a prominent local vet practice is Newman Watters. Their site is by one of the main roads, so anyone coming into town from the northbound A1 sees it.
Fortunately, I am much more attached to my first name than my surname. It was easy for me to agree for JA to take L's surname for example.
* It was a three class per year, i.e about 90 pupils, grammar school that was being converted into the local sixth form college as part of going comprehensive. The year that was two below us was the last grammar school intake, and some will have left at 16.