names

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Throwback Thursday: My Name Is Not Susan

Below is a reprint of one of my most popular posts of all time. When random people find my blog, it’s because of this post. I can only assume most people are searching for “how to pronounce Joan,” and good for them.

Back when I wrote the below post, I was completely anonymous. So I used the names Joan and Joanne as an example of another set of names that are very similar to one another but WILDLY (to me) different in sound and feel.

These days, I use my real first name with wild abandon online and in the analog world. Online is preferable because people get my name right 99% of the time. In person, however, people still get it wrong. More than eleven years after writing this post, people STILL call me Susan. Almost every time I have to interact with a human, in fact. I have gotten much better about correcting them in the moment, but it still feels awkward. I think I also have a little more grace to offer than 2012 Suzanne did; she hadn’t yet gone through the humbling experience of having a child, so let’s forgive her for being so rigid about so much and so easily outraged. (I am still rigid and easily outraged… just less so.)

One phenomenon I have come across recently is name uncertainty. By this I mean a person with whom I have multiple encounters who vacillates between calling me Suzanne and Susan. When we had painters in our house, the foreman did this. Sometimes he would call, “Susan? Can you come look at this?” When his supervisor visited, he introduced me as Suzanne. This back and forth went on for three weeks. I may have corrected him the first time, but it didn’t stick, and I just didn’t care enough to go through the awkwardness of correcting him every time. Near the very end of our time together, he asked, “Is it Susan or Suzanne?” So clearly he wasn’t sure, ever, and was just trying things out. Maybe he hoped I wouldn’t answer to one of them and he could use process of elimination to figure out the truth. A similar thing happened when I was going through the process of finding a car to lease; the leasing agent kept going back and forth between Susan and Suzanne. Oh well. There are worse things.

If You Pronounce Joan and Joanne the Same Way, Please Do Not Read This Post

As I have mentioned before, people mispronounce my name all the time.

I don’t really get it. My name is not COMMON, but it’s not UNHEARD-OF. A couple of celebrities share my name, including a wildly popular author.  It was the name of at least one delightfully-divatastic, pig-owning sitcom character.

And, in my opinion, it’s spelled phonetically.  Well, not exactly phonetically, because I think phonics uses a bunch of weirdo symbols and stuff to denote sound? I don’t know. Are phonics and phonetically even related? Let’s pretend I never mentioned phonics.

What I’m trying to say is, I think it’s spelled the way it sounds.

Yet people mispronounce it a good 90 percent of the time.

Okay, okay. Maybe this is a product of Modern Times, where kre8tiv spellings are so abundant that you feel like you’re so unlikely to mispronounce a name that you just don’t even want to TRY anymore. Because even if you DO try, you wind up with the wrong pronunciation probably half the time.

Leikynlea could be LAY-kin-lee or LEE-kin-LAY-uh or Lay-KIN-lee or, well, the brain boggles at the potential pronunciations.

And just because a name is “old fashioned” in look doesn’t mean it’s old fashioned in SOUND! I mean, John may very well be Jo-hen or Juh-OH-wen or Yone or whatever, right?

I come from a town that’s FULL of unique names, so I GET IT. You just can’t win.

So typically, when people mispronounce my name, I just… deal with it. It happens. Whatever. Most people who are using my name like this are people I’ll never see again. So I just go with it.

But…

Sigh.

Anyway, my name gets mistaken most often for one other name. A very similar name, sure. But a TOTALLY DIFFERENT NAME, with its own spelling and own pronunciation.

And yes, a quick perusal of the Social Security Administration website shows that my name hasn’t been in the top 1000 names for girls since 1999, and even then it was given to fewer than 100 girls…

And the name my name gets mistaken for is still in the top 1000 names for girls, albeit given to fewer than 250 girls in 2011… So clearly, my name is less popular and less well-known than its doppelganger.

But come on. COME ON.

Let’s say my name is Joanne. It isn’t, but that’s a close enough approximation and it’s similar-ish in popularity.

So people frequently call me Joan. (Not really – Joan is a stand-in.)

Seriously. That is what they do. They call me Joan ALL THE TIME.

Even when I have helpfully spelled it out for them. Even when I have clearly stated my name FOR THEM.

Nope, still Joan.

After 30-odd years of this, you’d think I would be USED TO it.

And yet… I am not.

I went to the doctor the other day (missing a work meeting because of certain office restrictions and I am still not over it ARGH) and checked in at the reception desk. I said my name plainly and clearly. The receptionist handed my file – with my name written on it in clear capital letters – to the nurse. A nurse I’ve seen two or three times in the past six months.

The receptionist handed me a survey to fill out. (Speaking of which, do you ever have trouble answering those stupid questions on medical forms? Do you check the “headaches” box even though you only have headaches occasionally? And what about those yes or no questions? What if the answer is “sometimes” instead of a hard yes or a hard no? A lot of those questions seem like they should allow for a lot more grey area than they do!)

So I sat down in the only empty seat in the waiting room and settled in for the long wait. Because I have been to this doctor several times, and I always have to wait for at LEAST 15 minutes.  That’s why they give you paperwork with maddeningly confusing questions – so you don’t notice how much time is passing.

I got to about question 5 on that stupid form when, out of the corner of my ear (that’s totally a thing), I faintly heard someone call, “Joan?”

But I ignored it, because it wasn’t my name. So while my “someone is talking” sensors activated, my “someone is calling YOUR name” sensors did not.

Also, to make my case air-tight, I would like to clarify that I’d been there for about two minutes. If that. My seat wasn’t even warm yet, Internet.

I plowed through a few more questions – blatantly IGNORING one, I’ll have you know – and was vaguely aware that the person was still calling, “Joan? JOAN?”

So, like a normal person, I looked up to see what the hell Joan was doing that was so important she was ignoring the poor nurse. (Texting, probably.)

Of course, as you know, the poor nurse was looking at ME.

So, of course, were all the other patients. Poor, hearing-impaired Joan, their collective expressions said.

I looked at her with great surprise and did the Incredulous Self Point and she said, across the ENTIRE waiting room FULL of people, “Your name IS Joan, right?”

I was embarrassed, obviously, so I said, “Oh! Nope, it’s JoANNE!” in a way that I hoped was cheerful and un-blamey and this-happens-all-the-time, and followed it up with a cheery, “Wow, you guys are sure fast today!”

I don’t feel like I should have been embarrassed. It was the nurse’s mistake, after all. But I WAS and I AM.

(Perhaps this is payback for misspelling/missaying my work colleague’s name for so long?)

There’s nothing I can DO about it, obviously, except complain to you. (You: Gee, thanks.) I mean, I just have to spell my name and pronounce it clearly and accept the inevitable Joaning and, apparently, tune my “someone is calling your name” sensors to Joan AND Joanne.

I just want you to share my exasperation.

Before I let you go, allow me to add another gripe to this one.  It’s even MORE perplexing to me, Internet.

This one goes out to fast food servers and restaurant hostesses everywhere: If you were to hear a name, you would write it down in such a way that you would remember how to pronounce it, right?

I mean, obviously if you see my name out in the wild with no context and you can’t figure out how to pronounce it, that’s one thing. Forgivable. (Although: sigh.)

But if you DON’T ask, and YOU write it down the way you THINK that collection of sounds should be spelled, then wouldn’t you pronounce it correctly when you tell me my order/prescription/table is ready?

Sadly, Internet, the answer is typically no.

If people misname you, what do they call you? If you could choose a different name from your own, what would it be?

I am kinda sorta attempting to complete NaBloPoMo, with the full expectation that life will make it impossible any day now. If you want to follow along, or join the fun, check out San’s blog here.

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Nicknames

I was calling up to my daughter this morning, to tell her breakfast was ready, and it struck me that I never in a million years would have predicted that I would end up using the nickname I most often do. 

One of the reasons I fell in love with her name is because it had an abundance of nickname choices. I didn’t love one of the nicknames – the most common one – because it seems to be fairly common overall, both as a nickname for her name… but also as a nickname for other names… or even as a name by itself. But her name was in our family tree, and my husband and I both loved it, and it had ALL those other nickname possibilities… and I had fallen in love with one of the (lesser used) nicknames in particular. 

Let’s say, for example’s sake, that her given name is Carla (which it is not), and I had been sure, just sure that I would call her LaLa. But instead, I almost exclusively call her Carly – the very common nickname I had wrinkled my nose at early on. 

It really is so funny how naming works. Because now that “Carly” is inextricably associated with my darling child, I love it. 

A couple of times, I have given LaLa a go, just to see what would happen. (Carla is fine with this; she seems to find it sort of novel, that I had planned to call her LaLa.) But not only does LaLa seem very separate from Carla-the-person, it feels odd in my mouth.

I also love that her friends have come up with their own separate nickname for her: Cars. It’s so cute, and I never would have imagined it when I was choosing her name. Sometimes I call her Car, sure, but Cars seems different in a way that I find so charming. Well. Perhaps you’d have to be here, in my brain, to see it. 

Who knows why we never gave LaLa a fair shake from the beginning. Probably it’s because we refer to Carla, 90% of the time, as Carla. I use the Carly nickname a lot more these days than I ever have before; perhaps I am getting lazy in my decrepitude.

Oh! One unforeseen benefit of going with Carly over LaLa: One of the dogs down the street is LaLa. The dog is only a few years old, so I’m guessing that if we had gone with LaLa, the neighbors would have chosen something else. But maybe not! 

Did you have a nickname growing up? Do you now? I’ve had a couple over the years. My parents planned a nickname for me, based on squishing part of my first name together with a common nickname for my middle name. That sounds really weird when I can’t just share it with you, but that’s how they came up with it. They LOVED it. In fact, I think I even went by that name for some time. But – and I remember the event clearly, even if I can’t remember at all how old I was – I was enrolled in ski school at some ski resort when I was little, and someone mispronounced my nickname in such a horrid, detestable way that I immediately and vehemently refused to answer to that name ever again.

Later on, in high school, a couple of kids called me Susie. But it was irregular and there were only a few specific people who did so. I never introduced myself as Susie or anything. 

In college, one of my beloved roommates started calling me Suz, which stuck. That’s how I began referring to myself. My mom and my husband and a handful of other people (almost exclusively college friends) still call me that today. Aside from that, my husband doesn’t use any nicknames for me. Sometimes he’ll call me “Babe.” But that’s it. 

Once college ended, I went back to using my full name at work and when I met people. So most people just call me by my full first name. 

The lack of nicknames almost makes a little wistful, I guess, because I am a very nickname-y person (though I try not to be annoying about it). Obviously, if you don’t like a nickname, I will refer to you by whatever name you choose. But I tend to have multiple endearments for my nearest and dearest. As I said earlier, I refer to Carla as Carly (most often), and then Car, and then C, but I also call her Little Cat or Kitten (because she used to make a purring sound after she drank milk when she was an infant) or Honey Bun or Cutey Patootie or Sweetheart or whatever strikes my fancy in the moment. I have a variety of sobriquets for my husband. I even still call my brother by his childhood nickname, which I am sure he LOVES (but he has never bristled or asked me to stop).