Has your name ever made your life more difficult? This seems to be my year for it!
And, on what at first might not seem a related note (but stay tuned), my new book is out! Actually, it's only available for pre-order, if you're enough of a mad risk-taker to spring for a $4.99 ebook before the reviews are in. But it's only a short wait: fully available to read in ebook format, or as a $15.99 paperback on March 28. And if you have Kindle Unlmited it's free.
More on this (much more, probably) once the book is officially launched and no one is rushing to buy it. But I thought I'd at least mention it now.
Check out the link here: Niccolo Would Like a Word on Amazon.
So why has my rather ordinary name caused me grief? And do I have crotchety observations about names in other contexts? Of course I do!
Oh joy! Endlessly Phoning Insurance Companies
This has been a confounding off-and-on battle the past couple of years, but I finally solved the mystery. Well, several mysteries:
Why was my insurance company denying all my claims, on the basis that I had co-insurance with another company, which I did not in fact have? (And how do you prove a negative? Said insurance company wouldn't let me talk to anyone straighten it out, because I couldn't access their system, because I did not actually have insurance with them).
Why were charges showing up on my Explanation of Benefits form for procedures I'd never had, at places I'd never been to? Even after I complained to said billing departments that they weren't my bills?
Well, turns out there's another Janice Graham who also lives in Massachusetts with my exact same date of birth. Not just same day and month, but same year. So my insurance problems followed me from private insurance to Medicare when we both signed up at the same time.
I happened to catch an address that showed up on some portal or another, so I copied it down and did some internet sleuthing. Found my namesake, called her up, and we had a nice chat! She'd been getting my bills too. We are in the process of trying to straighten it out, but insurance companies are not known for swiftly resolving their own errors.
Maybe years back I should have just legally changed my name to Crabby McSlacker? I can't imagine I'd be having the same problems.
Um, No, I'm Not That Jan Graham
This was fun: when you launch an Amazon book page, it generates a similar book page on Goodreads. Authors desperately crave visitors, and especially people kind enough to leave positive reviews to draw in new readers and boost their visibility. Goodreads is apparently powerful, so it's an important part of the marketing process.
So when I went to Goodreads, there was my book! Linked to author Jan Graham. Alas, not me. But she doesn't look entirely unlike me either.
As it happens, the other Jan Graham specializes in erotic BDSM fiction, and identifies as Submissive.
Not that there is anything wrong with that. Plus she probably sells way more books than I ever will.
But... would new potential readers, or even more chillingly, casual acquaintances or old friends I haven't seen in ages, or people I know only through the interwebs think "well gosh, this is an interesting side to Jan we didn't know about?"
It took a bit of doing but I have decoupled us, saving hordes of fans hungry for erotic BDSM fiction from bitter disappointment when purchasing my novel. Murderous revenge plot? Check! Adult themes? Check. Bondage and spanking? Er, no. Sorry.
Anyone Else Not Crazy About Their Name?
So I've never much liked my first name Janice
It's supposed to be pronounced the French way, like Jah-NEECE. My mother's family was from Louisiana and all spoke French. But since it's spelled Janice, it looks like it should be pronounced as JAN-iss. In any event, I've always gone by my nickname, Jan, except for a brief period of time when I had an online identity of Jamie, which I felt suited me better, but whatever. It's not impossible, but it's difficult to change your first name midlife, and I didn't have the determination to become a Jamie for real.
What's wrong with Jan/Janice? Well, nothing that dramatic. Just the strange feeling I get when I mispronounce my own legal first name as JAN-iss because it's easier for everyone that way. And the sense that my nickname adds about 10 years to my perceived age, because it was already well on the way out when I got it. It's not a classic, like Elizabeth or Katherine. Jan is the Ethel or Agnes of my generation.
The fact that the whiniest Brady was named Jan is probably not gonna bode well for any comeback.
But Here's What Helped Me Get Over It
I've met so many cool Jan's in the last couple of decades! I don't know where they were when I was younger. But there are plenty of them around now, and oddly enough, many are writers or fans of the written word.
And yeah, most of them are older than I am. But since they are not me, I can detach the name from the uncomfortable sense of me/not me, and the name suddenly becomes a simple ordinary syllable. Nothing inherently stodgy, just a sound. Not unlike John or Jim or Jane or Jay or June. Simple. Innocuous.
So Many People Have it Worse
Moon Unit and Dweezil Zappa are always the first ones to come to mind, but there are plenty of other shitty names parents give their kids. Sometimes without even realizing it! For example, the White Pages says there are at least fifteen hundred men named Michael Hunt in the U.S. But I imagine most of them avoid being called Mike. As in, picture yourself introducing your new friend to your mother: Mom, meet Mike Hunt! Similarly, the many Harold Dicks out there probably hate it when anyone shortens their name to Harry.
Many people embrace their unusual names. It hasn't hurt the Zappas. And Marijuana Pepsi Vandyck went on to write about prejudice faced by Black students with unusual names in white classrooms.
And of course there's Randy Rainbow! What a convenient handle for a brilliant gay comedian/composer.
Have any of you had problems with your name? Or run into any unusual names?
The problem with my first name is it’s not uncommon, just spelled weird (instead of an “i,” there’s a “y”). The bigger problem is the last name, both my birth name and married name, are hard to pronounce and mangled regularly.
ReplyDeleteSo far, however, I’ve not met anyone with my exact name.
As for children’s names, I used family names for my kids, regular, ordinary names which wear well in the wash and don’t fade, as I like to say, and told them to get their weird nicknames from their friends. All of them have thanked me for it.
Messymimi, I think that is the most brilliant (and witty) advice I've ever heard when it comes to naming children.
DeleteMy first name is easy enough, my second name seems to be impossible for non-English speakers but I usually manage to figure out they mean me! I have one famous namesake, a medical researcher, which has the pleasant side effect of making me impossible to Google: he even lives in roughly the same area I used to live in!
ReplyDeleteMy son has the same fun and games with his surname, but we tried to compensate a little by giving him a first name that's spelt and pronounced the same in both English and Spanish. Not as easy as you might think!
Ah yes, SeƱor Pato, I can imagine! Especially since the Spanish scrupulously pronounce every letter except, mysteriously, H, and Northern Europeans (Especially English and French) delight in throwing in tons of extra letters serving only to confuse. I got lucky with Graham, since the gratuitous letters are an H and an extra A, and all I'd get was a lot of pausing mid name. But I went back to Jah-NEECE as a first name there because they actually pronounced it the French way. And with the vowel sounds being different as well, naming a kid the same in both languages would indeed be tricky! Well done.
DeleteMy last name lends itself to some bad jokes. I have always hated being called by my actual first name, and much prefer the nickname, but I spell it with a 'y' instead of an 'i' which can cause confusion online - a lot of men think I am a male rather than a little white-haired crippled old lady! I even had one charming fellow want to meet me in the alley so he could whup my ass when we disagreed about something online! I had fantasies of sending the biggest, baddest guy I knew to meet him, but sadly, the address he gave me was incomplete!
ReplyDeleteOh my goodness, there are such abominable asshats online these days, aren't there? Take solace in the fact that anyone who is looking for a fight that badly probably gets plenty of what's coming to him one way or another. And it's funny, I never thought of the I vs Y as a gender identifier but, yes, come to think of it, it usually is!
DeleteTerry/Terri doesn’t seem as gender sorted around here. Never noticed it.
DeleteOkay, twice I forgot to scroll past Anonymous, but obviously those Anonomouses (Anonymice?) are me, jan/janice, the author of the blog. I only wish I had a rabid commenter eager to reply to each thread!
ReplyDeleteHonestly didn't even notice. You could comment under any name you want and I think it would still be obviously you! š
DeleteMy name! The government refuses to allow me my full name. Therefore I spend a lot of time in doctor’s offices and anywhere else they call your name waiting for “Mary” to answer, and explaining to people who fail to enter it in the system that I had two great aunts and a grandmother’s best friend named Mary and I learned before I could even talk not to respond to the first half of my name.
ReplyDeleteMy last name ought to be easier. It is one syllable and only five letters and English and doesn’t sound like anything else, yet I spent a lot of time spelling it, and correcting mistaken other names until I moved to the county where my father grew up. There are a lot of us here.
How frustrating when your name shouldn't be that complicated! For some reason clerks/receptionists often translate Jan Graham to Pam Brown when they repeat it back to me. And OMG Peter Will Sprinkle, the poor man!!!! That's child abuse, and then adult abuse, and then elder abuse. The guy should have changed his last name to Rule, or Winn!
DeleteMy favorite mistake is Miriam for Mary Anne. At least they're related. But repeating my last name back to me doesn't stop them from entering a completely different name into their computer.
DeleteUnusual names. I forgot to mention some of my mother’s social work clients in the 1930s. The twins, born in 1933, and named Rosy and Velda for the president. The woman who, in the haze of childbirth, heard the medical staff talking about the placenta, and thought it was a beautiful word, and named her daughter that. The man whose parents named him Peter Will Sprinkle. (He was an Old Age Assistance client, so he must have been dead for decades, or I wouldn’t give his full name.)
ReplyDeleteMy first name has been ok but it's spelled a dozen different ways and of course mine is not the commonest one. My last name has changed three times! My maiden name was pronounced totally differently from the spelling, my first married name was NINE letters long, and my last one is often misspelled because people don't LISTEN. hahaha
ReplyDeleteMarried names! One of my friends married a man with a Polish name and my first thought when they got divorced after ten years was "But I learned to spell AND pronounce his last name!" Her second (for more than 30 years) husband's name is White, but she didn't take that one!
DeleteWhy do women's first names have so many different spellings? Why do mothers always think girls want to be unique when most of us just want to fit in? And I keep hoping the convention of women's last names changing with marriage will eventually disappear, but so far, it seems to be hanging in there. And the "people don't LISTEN," that's for sure. (Although guilty as charged... names fall out of my head milliseconds after someone tells me theirs).
Delete