Not much to it... a random question, whether simple or thought-provoking, is posed, giving you something to write about on days when you fail to be inspired by original material.
I logged into my LJ for the first time in a looooong time, and browsed through some of the questions. I came across this little one that I thought would be fun to answer:
How have people pronounced your name? How is it supposed to sound?
It's funny, isn't it? The name "Kelly" is actually quite common, people have no trouble pronouncing it correctly, and yet swap out one measly letter to make "Helly" and all of a sudden nobody can pronounce it.
The 2 most common mispronunciations of my name?
"Hee-ly"
and
"Hay-ly"
Every once in a while I get "Hal-ly" (as in Halle Berry)
Equally often? I get called Kelly, Holly, or Helen.
Then there is my last name. Y'know, neither of my names should be that hard to pronounce. Just look at the letters that spell them, and enunciate accordingly. "Kwee" should sound the way it is spelled (like "queen" without the ending "n").
But I've frequently gotten "Kee", "Kiwi" (my nickname as a cadet was "Kiwi"-- since everyone in the Army goes by last names), "Knee" (!!!) and everything else you could possibly imagine-- mostly garbled mumblings as people struggle to make sense of the 4 letters printed on the sheet before them.
My favorite comes from a classmate of mine, who studied the "Helly Kwee" I'd written on one of our lab writeups to turn in. She remarked:
"That makes my eyes cross. It looks like it should be 'Kelly Hwee' instead!"
Sadly... she wasn't the only to one to say it, as I've gotten that same remark a few times in the years following.
As a bit of a digression-- Allan has a different problem: not pronunciation, but spelling. Since he uses the less-common British spelling, most people assume his name is spelled "Alan" or even "Allen".
Surprisingly, the same befalls Todd: a lot of people think it's spelled with only one "d": Tod. Which is unnerving because "Tod" means "death" in German! O.O
How about you? Any interesting stories about common manglings of your name?
(originally posted at: http://www.myspace.com/hellykwee/blog/360373473)
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