What was the most embarrassing misspelling of your name, first or last?

I got an autograph from Toni Tenniel and she signed it with the year 1989 and it was 1985.

Duh!

But my Maiden name sounds close to Star Wars and I was called that in the 70's when the movie came out. I told my kids that and they nearly died laughing. The dorks.

Not so much embarassing. Don't really believe in that, more like just an error. Can happen to anyone but, I have been known as Gonclaves on the entire University system for 3 or 4 years now, instead of Gonçalves

No one ever spells my first OR my last name correctly the first time, and most people don't spell it correctly even after being told numerous times. It's aggravating, but not really embarassing. Just because there are many chicks named Carol doesn't mean that my name is spelled the same. Sometimes it strikes me as rude, especially when it's spelled wrong by someone who knows me and has for a long time. It's like it's not worth remembering.

My brother and my sister have the same plague. Louis is always spelled Lewis, and Alyse gets all sorts of discombobulations - especially Elise. I can understand people misspelling and mispronouncing my last name - it's a very unusual name and I'd never even heard it before I met hubby. I'd never seen it outside of this family until I started doing a little family-tree stuff and traced it back to England. It's even pretty rare there. In fact, I thought hubby made it up because he didn't want to tell me his real last name.

It doesn't bother him, though. I guess he's used to it. Everyone misspells his first name too.

Woodchuck

My first name was misspelled on a traffic court document, so the judge kept calling me "Himey" instead of "Jamie". It's only the Spanish pronunciation of the name, which wouldn't have been so bad, except that everytime he did it, my sister would shriek with laughter from the back of the courtroom. It wasn't pretty.

My maiden name is Fleming, and there was one year at school where there was a glitch in the printout they gave all the teachers at the beginning of the semester.

"Flem? Patricia Flem?"

It took me years to get over that one.

My first name is Marie and when I did inside sales I would get many faxes addressed to Murray. We always knew those were mine.

Heh. Murray. Tee hee!

My brother's name is Ian, which wasn't nearly as popular then as it is now, and it was constantly being misspelled as Ira. Ira Flem.

:::cringes at the memory:::

LOLOL - these are funny.

Last name - in high school, they put in my yearbook "Stapletong" (there isn't supposed to be a "g" on the end of my name). So, that was fun...

I haven't had any embarassing misspellings of my name, but no one ever gets my name right. My name is Tamara, pronounced Tam-uh-ra or just Tam-ra. But, most of the time, I get Ta-mare-ah or even worse, ta-mar-o, as in tomorrow. It was ok when I wasn't married, as my maiden name was Green, so at least they got that part right.

My last name now is German, Belinc. It is never pronounced right. It is pronounced Ba-lins, but we get Bell-inc, Belinsky (where did that one come from, I don't get it?), Beeline and just about any other weird variation of it. If someone has this last name, he is related to us.

ETA: Even my own family members couldn't get my first name right. My brother couldn't say my name when he was little and it sounded something like "Bambi." He called me that for ages. Then, when my little sister came along, she couldn't say it either and it sounded something like "Bebop." Again, she called me that for ages. When my mom announced my name to everyone, my uncle and a family friend said they didn't like it, so they were going to call me George. The family friend still calls me George, and when he sees me out in public, he'll yell, "Hey George." My kindergarten teacher called me Tabitha because I reminded her of a girl she had had the year before named Tabitha. It's a wonder I even knew what my name is.

When I first married, my brother couldn't remember what my last name had changed to. I got a birthday card addressed to Mrs Ladosomething.

Small issue with my middle name:

"What's your middle name?"
"Kay"
"No, not the intial, what's your middle name?"
"Kay"
"Come on, it can't be that embarassing. What does the K stand for?"
"Kay!"
"Whatever. Jerk."

My father grew up thinking his name was Alvin. When he got to the Air Force, at 17, they informed him of the "o" someone had inadvertently placed on his birth certificate, and that his name was actually "Alvino."

Alvino?

He immediately started going by "wayne" since, of course, his middle name is dewayne.

Go figure.

Interestingly enough. What is it about old dudes and not using their actual name? Do you get a "old dude code name" when you hit fifty? My grandfather's name was Alvin. He was known as Bud. My father-in-law's name is Junior (yep. Junior. :|). He also is known as Bud.

This is slightly off topic, but close enough. I worked in a bank and one morning, a customer came in, fit to be tied. I'm telling you, this man was furious. So he takes the seat across from me and launches into the account of his faulty account. Admittedly, there was a problem. So I, in good customer service mode, took his name to call up the offending records. Most unfortunately, his name was Gordon Gordon. And may god strike me dead, his middle initial was 'G'. I had to keep making up excuses to leave the room to guffaw and to harness the intense desire to ask him what the 'G' stood for. You just can't maintain righteous indignation with a name like 'Gordon G. Gordon'. Resolution took forever, because I couldn't straighten up. But the mileage on the story was good.

ON a group project in college three of us together had to do a sociology paper, research and experiment, the whole deal. Two of us did a great deal on the experiment part of it, the other did a lot of the research part of it. She also said that since she thought her part was smaller, that she would type the whole thing. The day we turned it in, the cover page of the paper read all of our names. Mine: Patricia. I'm not a Patricia. I'm a Trisha. She said, "Well I just assumed Trish was short for Patricia" --yea, great thanks.
And she was offended when I scratched it out with my pen and wrote my first name (I messed up her perfectly typed 25 page paper by putting a scratch out on the front page, apparently) I wanted to say, "You're offended? People get offended when their names are shortened by others, image how it feels to have your name inaccurately lengthened."

oh well.

Perks, names give me serious giggles. I still haven't gotten over the IT candidate I had to set up a phone interview for; the last name is "gotti pati" (one word). On the voicemail with the consulting firm I said "go to potty" "gotta potty" "goatie patty" and then giggled senselessly before I apologized and hung up.

When I was a kid, my mom went back to work part time for a small business in New Jersey which had something to do with credit reporting (it's now a huge company, they're the ones who approve your transaction when you swipe your credit card). Anyway, when she worked there each client had a punch-hole computer card, and they were logged in by the first five letters of the client's last name.

My mom had a client named Mr. Oshitaki.

Much mirth ensued when she came home that night.

A few years ago, some Asian women in the area were arrested for prostitution. They were running a massage place as a front. I wish I could remember the spelling of one of the names, but our crime reporter said the name was pronounced "Come Some Time." Very fitting for a prostitute.

People get my name wrong all the time, but my favorite instance was a couple of months ago, when someone called and asked for "M.J." (which is the name I use on my books). My husband told the guy he had a wrong number...and hung up on the journalist who was calling to set up an interview.

Southern_girl29 said:

ETA: Even my own family members couldn't get my first name right. My brother couldn't say my name when he was little and it sounded something like "Bambi." He called me that for ages. Then, when my little sister came along, she couldn't say it either and it sounded something like "Bebop."

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I can kinda relate to that. They can all SAY my name, but my sister spelled it wrong until I was 25. See, my middle name is Lee. Everyone in the family calls me Carolee as one word, and mom even occasionally spells it that way.

I was writing my name on something or other and spelled out Carole Lee. Alyse asked why I spelled it that way and I said, "Because that's my name." She said, "Nuh-uh! Your name spelled is C-a-r-o-l-e-e". I really cracked up when I realized she was serious. I was 25 and she was 35 and she only THEN learned that Carole and Lee were two totally separate names. She argued that the "e" on the end of my first name threw her off.

Memo: the whole world

The name 'McCreery' is not, nor has it ever been, spelled with a Q.

Cripes.

dclary said:

Interestingly enough. What is it about old dudes and not using their actual name? Do you get a "old dude code name" when you hit fifty? My grandfather's name was Alvin. He was known as Bud. My father-in-law's name is Junior (yep. Junior. :|). He also is known as Bud.

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Ha! That is SO true!!! My dad, 75, is known as Soup or Soup Bean among his peers, supposedly because he always took soup beans to school for lunch when he was a kid. My uncle, Dad's older brother, was known as Bud, although his name was Louis (also my brother's name, but he only gets Lou or Louie as variations except for Unka-Doo when my boys were little). Now, Uncle Bud's oldest son is ALSO named Louis (Yeah, we like the name) but HE isn't called Bud. HE is called Buddy. My sister's husband's name is George, but no one ever calls him that. He is known as Butch. (My sister came by a nickname when she was little, but NO ONE uses it that wants to live. It's Ick. Yes. Ick. Or Ickabush. I have no earthly idea where it came from, but apparently it's been her nickname since she was a baby.)

One of Mom's older brothers was named Jack but his siblings all called him Big Smoke or Smoke for short. Hubby and his dad also have names that they use with eachother: St. Marc and St. James. Don't ask. Even my older son has had the nickname of Doc since he was about 5 years old. I imagine that one will be with him forever. It suits him.

How is it that a lot of men get nicknames but I don't know many women who do? Is it a guy thing? Also, how on earth did Peggy become a standard and very common nickname for Margaret?

My brain hurts.

Not really embarrassing or whatever, but... I first got an email account in 1995 and at least twice I've gotten email asking if I was the Ben Bradley who's the editor of the Washington Post (he was editor when reporters Woodward and Bernstein broke so much of the Watergate story that eventually brought down President Nixon, and he was one of two people who knew who the secret Watergate-scandal informant "Mark Felt" "Deep Throat" was). I've responded that 1. he spells his last name Bradlee, and 2. he's retired.

This didn't happen to me, but when my uncle was in college he thought it would be funny if he wrote that his last name was "Mindley Pudding" (as his real last name sounds vaguely similar to that.) Anyway, he's now a professional adult, and he still gets bills and stuff addressed to "Jonathen Mindley Pudding."

"Someone once called me George W." --- George H.W. Bush