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What's in a name?

When I was asking someone for the correct spelling of their name last week, they mentioned that people have a tendency to spell their name wrong. I told them I felt their pain, and spelled my first name for them.
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Nouvelle Viewpoint

When I was asking someone for the correct spelling of their name last week, they mentioned that people have a tendency to spell their name wrong.


I told them I felt their pain, and spelled my first name for them. It took them a moment to realize how to say it.


I’ve got to the point in my life where I simply spell my name out when someone asks it, because no one has ever gotten it right without knowing my name is out of the ‘norm.’


Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got a lot of compliments on how my name looks. It’s an interesting spelling, and I rarely find people with it spelt as uniquely as mine is.


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When I worked in retail, I had a lot of women tell me they wished their parents had chosen to add the ‘ynne’ instead of the ‘in’ or ‘yn’ to their names.


I’ve actually had people find me on social media from all over the world, simply because we spell it the same way.


According to my family lore, my dad chose the name Robin and my grandmother picked the spelling. She claims she knew I wasn’t going to be feminine, so my name might as well be.


My parents didn’t want me to have the same spelling as the bird, and liked how it looked along with our last name.


It wasn’t until two weeks after I was born that my dad read an article that said by giving their child a name with an out of the norm spelling, they’d cursed me for life.


No one would ever spell my name right, and I’d spell it out instead of saying it whenever someone else had to write it out.


My mom, being the lovely woman she is, simply shrugged it off and said ‘it suits her.’


I’ve never found my name written on anything correctly, and likely never will. This actually resulted in my realization there’s no Santa Claus, because an ornament I got in a stocking one-year had my name written in my mom’s handwriting. (Just kidding, mom, I still believe!)


While I did strongly consider changing the spelling for a few years, it’s just part of who I am.


I’m not sure what I would do if people didn’t pause to look at the spelling, or if it didn’t make someone pause when they first read it.


If I have children, one will have the same curse as me with a name with spelling out of the norm.


Probably because I’ll like that spelling, and also to have someone else know my pain.




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