Saturday, May 3, 2008

Misspellings of my Name

My name is intriguingly hard for people to spell correctly. More often than not it's spelled wrong. Every single letter of my name has been written wrong, save for the final a--well until this last week. Yes, someone got the final a in Vanessa incorrect. "How?" you might ask. Well, I'll tell ya, with 2 of them. Vanessaa. ???What the????Huh?? So there you go.
In honor of this momentous occasion, I've decided to do an acrostic poem of sorts, celeb(r)ating the variations of my name. (The double SS only gets one spot for logistical reasons):


V ..... b w
A ..... e i u
N ..... nn ns
E ..... i a
SS ... s z
A ..... aa

To be honest, some of them I don't get, like the ns for the n: Vansessa? Some of these variations are by non-native English speakers: b, w, z. Ooh, I can't stand Wanessa. Blech. One of the funniest ways I ever saw my name (inexplicably) spelt was Venison. No, I'm not kidding. But that's such an aberration that I didn't include it in the acrostic poem. I also get Venice a lot. But it's just because they think my name is Venice even though I say [vænɛsǝ], stress on the vanEssa. vEnice?
Anyway, it's fun to play mix and match with the letter possibilities:
wennizaa or binsasa or vunnissaa
The creations are multitudinous and all are pronounced singularly as Vanessa. Have fun playing!! And if you come up with any fun ones, or perhaps can think of letter misspellings that I left out, do comment!


**Here is where my father would vehemently interject say that my name is to be pronounced solely as
[vænɛsǝ], with that first a pronounce as the a from or dad or apple and not the a from about. I'm fine with that, but it completely goes against the majority of American English speech patterns, to say nothing of being bizarre to our phonotactic registry (or what sounds the American English accent allows to be strung together). I try to explain this to him, that it's abnormal to say that a like apple sound there for Americans, but does he ever flip a wig and say that they should easily be able to and I should demand so much...that it is my name after all... But really, I don't care how people say my name and don't often bring up the characteristic save for anecdotally. To be honest, it's when I pronounce my name "correctly" that it causes the most spelling and comprehension problems, thereby bolstering my argument that this antiquated pronunciation falls outside the bounds of normality.
Wow, that was totally more than you bargained for or even needed to know, I bet.
But for those of you who read this long addendum, you all get a sucker!!!

2 comments:

Claire said...

OOOh I get a sucker! I want a sucker! Mail it toooo meeeeee.

My name is spelled wrong all the time too, usually its without the i or the e.
I once had an ENGLISH professor call me Clairee (pronouncing the e) for half a semester. I was embarassed for him.

M said...

Yeah, so where's my sucker?

People like to misspell my last name.