• ReiRose@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    51
    ·
    11 months ago

    T’Fanny for Tiffany. She’s about 30 now, so that was a bad decision from a long time ago.

        • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          11 months ago

          Only younger generations wear fanny packs “correctly”. They were originally a hip bag that stayed behind you, not something you wore in front of you. Because fanny was slang for ass in America.

          So younger generations wear them “wrong” in the sense that they were originally meant to be worn behind you. But “correctly” in the British sense.

  • Krudler@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    31
    ·
    11 months ago

    Not so much the spelling, just… I went to school with a girl who’s father fled the law and they ended up near us in Canada… they were originally from a trailer park in Tennessee

    Her name was “Dollarina”

  • wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    29
    ·
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    I would like to provide a counterexample. There are plenty of these people in the US intermountain west, but there are at least some cases where there is no one at fault. Next time you see one of these names without context (though we clearly have the context in this case), before judging, consider Nariaw:

    I am a teacher, and one year I found that my roster included a student named “Nariaw”. As a public school, we register your student based on what’s on the birth certificate. I ask all of my students to pronounce their names for me when I first meet them, for the reason we see in so many of the replies here and with shit like “abcde”. However, when this girl came to my class, she said her name was pronounced “Miriam”. I spent a good twenty seconds looking at my roster, and had to ask her to spell it for me. I didn’t ask any rude and impertinent questions at that point, so it wasn’t until a few months later that I got the full story:

    Her mother, an immigrant from Ethiopia, was still unfamiliar with Latin script when her daughter was born here in the US. So when she attempted to write out the name, which she wanted to transliterate as “Mariam”, she ended up writing only half of the first M, and wrote the second one upside-down. Whoever did the data entry for the government records dutifully recorded the child’s name as “Nariaw”. Was the mother at fault for being expected to write a name which, while she knew how to represent it in Amharic, she was forced to write in a language in which she was illiterate?

    • milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      11 months ago

      Wow. Yeah, definitely good to be gracious in that situation!

      Another is, some cultures, not too far from home - like Irish and Welsh - have names written in ways that look Traighdiegh to English, but are the correct/traditional way to spell it for that culture.

    • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      11 months ago

      That’s super frustrating. The hospital should have easily been able to get someone who had at least a basic grasp of a common language to help ensure they understood the forms and got them filled out correctly.

      The fault is 100% with the hospital.

      • wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        8
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        11 months ago

        I would argue that at least 15% of the blame lies with the racist expectation in the US that all names need be anglicized, when we have fucking Unicode. If someone whose second language is English can be expected to be able to pronounce “Rayleigh Monaghan McTavish”, then the least that the anglophone people of the US could do is learn to pronounce things in a few other common languages. There is, quite simply, no excuse for the government of the united States, in which there is no official language (even though a traitor, invalidated by the insurrection clause of the 14th amendment, had some fuckwit draft a document trying to declare it without congressional approval), to mandate the use of a single language.

    • SnokenKeekaGuard@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      20
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      11 months ago

      It sounds like theres two people named Ellie. One of whom is Jewish.

      And they decided to distinguish her by calling her Jew Ellie.

      • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        11 months ago

        Ah the original working name for the villain of 101 Damnations. Jew Ellie DeVille. That was Walt’s contribution.

    • CoolMatt@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      11 months ago

      Once had a friend who said she had 3 middle names. Then she said what I thought I heard as Julianne. I thought she was joking and laughed at her joke.

      Then she got mad, called me stupid, then clarified that her 3 middle names were Jewel Lee Ann.

      I still thought she was joking. She was not.

      • Ziglin (it/they)@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        11 months ago

        I have a friend with three middle names too but he seemed used to people being confused and just told me where they came from.

  • cobysev@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    25
    ·
    11 months ago

    I knew a guy once whose last name was “EA.” Two capital letters. He pronounced it “Yeah.” His first name was Rodrake.

  • adhocfungus@midwest.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    19
    ·
    11 months ago

    There’s a girl in my kid’s class named Eighmee. Pronounced “Amy”. I thought it was weird but there’s a street in a neighboring town named Eighmee Street.

    • milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      11 months ago

      Wow. So maybe it wasn’t an “I’m so new and unique” Traighdiegh. I wonder what the history of Eighmee Street is.

  • 74 183.84@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    17
    ·
    11 months ago

    I haven’t met any one with a terribly spelt name but one girl I worked with was named America. Weird as hell if you ask me