If you’re not a member, you’ll never know about the time I’ve wasted spelling and respelling my last name for people on the phone and then telling them about the origin of it. I wish I was more self-aware at the time to realize my career choice, which included spending a lot of time on the phone exacerbates the issue. I find it comical today.
Having to spell one's name over and over again is an irritating experience; phonetics don’t work well on the phone. I have tested various strategies, such as phonetics, word games, and the military alphabet.
What’s your last name? Diversiev. Die-Vur-See-Ev
How do you spell that? It’s like two words: Diver and Sieve, with no ‘e’ at the end. (Sieve is an infrequently used word.) It looks like the peak use of “sieve” was in 1940 and has decreased by at least 62.5%. And, realistically, when was the last time you heard someone use that word who wasn’t elderly or a plumber?
How do you spell that? D I V E R S I E V,
Is that E Z at the end? Is that E I V? Sigh...
I’ve resorted to using the military alphabet.
Delta India Victor Echo Romeo Sierra India Echo Victor
The problem here is many people don’t know the military alphabet. Sometimes, I’d find myself saying Indigo vs. India. Ha.
Dealing with people for whom English is not their first language ratchets up frustration about spelling out my name. I learned to speak Spanish from my mother, as well as subsequent practice in the real world. I often speak with clients in Spanish. My last name sounds the same with a Spanish inflection but the combination of the letters is alien, so it definitely sounds foreign.
God help me when I went through this in Japan after university. This should have been a red light flashing before me about the complexity of my last name. I ignored it. If you’re a student of Japanese, you may realize that my last name is really difficult to convert to katakana, the alphabet for foreign words and names.
In Japanese, there are many foreign words that are recognizable as an English listener. Reading in Japanese is a whole different animal. If you hear words like “te-re-bi” or “in-taa-ne-to” you might be able to make out their meanings. “Te-re-bi” is short for terebishun, which you probably recognize as “television”. “In-taa-ne-to” means internet.
There’s no “er” sound in Japanese nor a “t” ending sound. Most consonants are attached to a vowel except an ending “n sound”. The consonant vowel pairing gets a little more complicated when paired with vowel “i” and my last name becomes:
Ji-baa-shi which I ended up truncating because the last part made it even crazier.
チ”バーシ
Ironically enough, I’ve often used this strategy -- truncating and mispronouncing my name to grease the skids of social interaction. Meeting someone new, if I’m not feeling like giving the spelling and history lesson, I’d often introduce myself as George Diversey. There’s a street on the north side of Chicago called Diversey which I often adopt as my own. Some people believe there’s a relation; there isn’t.
As for the origin of my name, my dad is Bulgarian. This often starts another tangent on the phone that I try to avoid. A lot of people hardly know anything about Bulgaria so I'm pressed to give a geography lesson which often doesn’t stick. Growing up in Chicago twenty years ago, the only other Bulgarians I’d ever met were at a Bulgarian church that we sporadically attended. These days I’m proud to read about Maria Popova’s success with Brainpickings.org, or Polina Marinova Pompliano of The Profile, or Nina Dobrev of the Vampire Diaries, or even Maria Bakalova of Borat fame. Being Bulgarian is cool again.
I don’t think I’ll ever change my name and as much as I relay the issues I’ve had. I’m grateful for being in the funny last name club. I have a built-in advantage on Google too -- something the John Smiths of the world can never have.