you named your kid what???

I work with a William Williams

Best friends dad was Pete Peters

What I don't get is people using unusual spellings for a name that already has a standard spelling. It just makes everyone's life harder. It's really stupid..

Yes! My name is Casey. Simple, standard, traditional spelling. But because dumb parents everywhere had to get cute and start spelling it with a K or -ie instead of -ey, my perfectly normal name is constantly being spelled in ways that makes me want to punch people. Every time I go to Starbucks, it never fails that a male barista will spell my name the right way without me having to tell him, but the chicks always spell it "Kacey" or "Casie" or (the most ridiculous attempt yet) "Kayci." It drives me absolutely nuts. I have actually started using fake names like Tiffany or Angela. They don't always spell those right either, but since that's not really my name, it doesn't bother me as much.

Totally feel for you on that. My girlfriend is called Jane. A more 'normal' name you could scarcely think of. Even so, a certain pizza takeaway near our old flat used to constantly spell it Jayne and once even put James! That went down well as you can imagine!

I would always assume the spelling is the most common/traditional one and that if it is not, the person will tell me so. I'm sure people called Kayci would be far less offended at it being written Casey, especially if they didn't spell it out at the time.

why does this matter so much? why can't people accept others' decisions to be unique and do whatever they want? the "most common/traditional" or "standard" way of spelling a name is usually considered the "best" by ethnocentric people. the problem i see is that many white Americans are terribly dismissive of trying to spell and/or pronounce names that are not the "most common/traditional" Eurocentric names. and people wonder why the rest of the world thinks we're so ignorant in the U.S.

sure, these posts are all in fun, but i think we should also be reminded of the assumptions about people's abilities and intelligence that go into our judgements based on their names. what's so "stupid" about spelling Kayci in that manner?

I once conducted business with a lady named Dorcas Bushrod.

My oldest son had a classmate named Blanca (white). She was black. I always felt a little sorry for her.

My name is Bianca and it means white as well and I'm black.
So what does that suppose to mean? Black people can have good names? We're suppose to have black names like "Shuntay" and "Kiesha"? Oh better yet we're suppose to have names like Negro because it matches our color?

I work in the education system and one of our secretaries actually has a list of names that we have come across! For example: Flame, Chardonnay, ****head, Imunique (pronounced I'm unique), Desire, Sparkle, Princess, Sky Blue, ... there are probably at least 50 names on the list and we keep adding more!