<p>I can understand, it’s frustrating when your kid is up there and doesn’t quite know how to react.</p>
<p>at my d’s HS end of yr award ceremony the gc (who met with her all year for college stuff) called her by a wrong and male name, got her college name wrong and announced the wrong award. at his third strike my usually quiet and mellow d said, “I’m outta here” and we left, we picked up and left the award ceremony early. don’t know if he was impaired or what, but I took it as a good sign that my d could take a stand like that</p>
<p>at my s’s college graduation he was walking across the stage and called by the wrong name, his name is common, and simple, no pronunciation issue. the president who knew my s realized it but said nothing. seemed they’d rather not embarass the administration and let the graduate simply feel awkward. my s let it go and said nothing but it bugged him how they handled it.</p>
<p>My last name was so badly mispronounced at the Senior Awards assembly (I was one of several State Scholars in my class) that I did not recognize my own name. Yes it is an ethnic (Italian) name but there were several families with that name where we lived and the assistant principal had no excuse for not knowing it.</p>
<p>Thankfully the person who read the names at graduation was competent enough to pronounce over 500 names correctly (many ethnic Italian or Polish). Who was that? Our 18 year old class president:).</p>
<p>To the OP- I’m sorry this happened. There really is no excuse for it.</p>
<p>We live in a very multicultural school district. Several years ago we attended an awards ceremony which was presided over by a district administrator who had been in the school district for several years in which there are many families with many students. Clearly she never looked at the list of recipients until she got to the podium. She mispronounced virtually all the names. It was embarrassing to say the least. DH who often had to preside over awards ceremonies in his professional career for the federal government was really offended. It doesn’t take much time to prepare-look the list over in the first place and find out how to pronouce each name, write out how to say each name and then read the list correctly. I work in sales and whenever I have to call a client with a name I don’t know how to pronounce I ask and then in my account notes indicate how to pronounce the name… very helpful also when my colleagues do the same as we have to cover each others accounts for vacation or when someone is at a conference.</p>
<p>This happened at my son’s Colgate graduation, even though the students were asked to write on an index card how their full name was to be pronounced. My son did so, but he probably would have been better off not writing it out phonetically. His middle name is a pretty common Irish last name (my family name), but the announcer absolutely butchered it. Particularly too bad since my father also graduated from Colgate and was very excited to watch his grandson get his degree, and my son included his middle name in honor of his grandfather. Oh well, a momentary annoyance on a very happy day.</p>
<p>Our kids write their names on a little index card phonetically. Then, when they line up to go in to the stadium, the pronouncers go down the line and practice with each kid. I have no idea how many they got right or wrong. The pronouncers are usually the Spanish teachers (60% Hispanic school) so most are pronounced correctly. But we have more and more African students with really long names. I heard my son’s friend “Osuchukwu” name pronounced 3 different ways at 3 different ceremonies. Most kids (and families) just shrug it off. My name was mispronounced at my baptism and my ordination. Oh well - I know who I am.</p>
<p>I think there’s a difference between a mispronunciation due to a slip of the tongue or nerves and a mispronunciation that is due to a lack of caring or lack of familiarity of the student body.</p>
<p>Kids spend four years at their high school and when they leave, they want to feel that they left a mark, that they were important. Having someone mispronounce your name says “you don’t matter much”. </p>
<p>Names are important. Having your principal or guidance counselor say the wrong name in front of the whole class and their families isn’t the same as having the clerk at Macy’s mispronounce it.</p>
<p>NJres-- maybe you have an “easy” name to pronounce. There’s a lot of culture and history in names, which I’m sure you know. If you don’t think it’s a “big deal” like some people do, that’s fine, but suggesting, even seriously joking, that people change their names to “John Smith” or something plain, common, and void of their cultures is not appropriate. This subject is a touchy one for a lot of people for a lot of reasons, namely family names being changed when relatives came over from different countries or people from certain ethnicities (ie Latinos and African Americans) naming their children White American/racially ambiguous names not to be wrongly judged in certain instances, because ignorant people can’t be bothered with learning how to say someone’s name.</p>
<p>When someone pronounces your name wrong, especially when honoring you, they aren’t talking about you. They’re talking about someone completely different. People try to save face when they make a mistake instead of owning up to it, and more often than not these announcers are adults who should know better.</p>
<p>DD’s first name gets mispronounced all the time. It ends in LINE but folks say LYN. Oh well. She also has things that are spelled incorrectly and that drives us much more crazy than a mispronunciation!</p>
<p>Off topic a little, but applicable… My D’s first name was mispronounced every single time we went to the pediatrician’s office for the first five or six years. The helper who puts you in the room for the dr. would open that door and call out her name–wrong again. Finally I told them we had been coming to that office her whole life and she needed them to say her name correctly! I asked them to write the correct pronunciation on the outside of the folder in big letters, and said I didn’t want to hear it incorrectly again. It helped, most of the time.</p>
<p>The then-principal at S1’s HS took an enormous amount of time to learn the names of every graduating senior (roughly 700 per class). It’s a school with a significant amount of diversity and students from all over the world. He nailed it every time and people loved him for it.</p>
<p>Our surname is always mispronounced, so we pretty much expect it. It’s actually kind of fun to predict which funky way it will be butchered, and it always gives us and our friends a good laugh. But I was still pretty surprised to hear it badly butchered at D’s HS graduation. I mean, come on… the kid’s been there for four years; she was a top student, class president, homecoming queen, super involved in tons of activities… and the principal has never heard her name spoken? :rolleyes:</p>
<p>Only once have I attempted to correct someone. My S was having a great game and each time he made a play, the announcer said his name differently. It didn’t bother me, but the announcer was clearly struggling with it and I felt bad for him, so I sent him up a note with the phonetic spelling. Of course, that doomed my son… he didn’t make another play for the rest of the game!</p>
<p>That’s awesome! Shows that he really cares about the kids… and that he’s got his act together. I bet he was a great principal in many other ways as well.</p>
<p>Our kids have their fathers’ last name which is routinely mispronounced.
They never seemed to mind.
I do remember a misspelling of DS’s name on a significant orchestra program that kinda irked ME…
Luckily, never suffered misspellings on diplomas.</p>
<p>DH finds it convenient to use MY Smith/Jones/Doe surname when leaving a name for restaurant pickup or lists. So useful to have a difficult name to stand out when needed and a bland one to blend in when needed.</p>
<p>Both my maiden name (Italian) and my married name (Jewish) have been butchered throughout my life. I’m used to it and just joke about it. I disliked my maiden name so I was glad to get rid of it. lol</p>
<p>NJer, it’s easy enough to give your kids easy to pronounce and spell first names (I did), but last names are a different matter all together. </p>
<p>I used to work for a firm called “The Arroyo Group” they had an entire wall covered with envelopes addressed to misspellings of their name. My favorite was “The Royal Group”.</p>
<p>I think the take home lesson from this thread is that mispronunciations are very, very common and it’s probably best not to get your knickers in a twist about them.</p>
<p>Mathmom, a relative’s mother also displayed a collection of misspellings of her last name. I was amazed at the variety of interpretations of her 8-letter 2-syllable relatively simple name.</p>
<p>Giving a kid a short, easy to pronounce first name does not guarantee that it will be used correctly. D1 has about the simplest name there is, but she has never liked the common nickname. She came home from pre-k in tears because, “My teachers don’t know my name. One of them calls me x-ie and the other one calls me love.” When she won an award in middle school she was quite annoyed that the local newspaper called her x-ie. She has learned to politely correct people immediately when they add the -ie.</p>
<p>I think there is a huge difference between getting a name wrong and pronouncing it with the accent that the speaker actually speaks with. That’s what happened at my D’s graduation and I think it was inexcusable for the girl to have disrupted the proceedings and screamed at the professor right on the stage. I happen to think it’s lovely to hear names pronounced by people with different accents. But it is completely different when someone who should know your name doesn’t.</p>
<p>Whenever I pick up one of my husband’s prescriptions, I give the clerk his name, then spell out the first two letters of the last name. Invariably, the clerk comes back to say there’s no prescription in that name. So then I spell the last name, and a fair number of times the clerk will come back and say there’s no prescription. So we do it all over again.</p>
<p>Okay, it’s an odd name with a first letter-second letter combination that isn’t seen in most languages. BUT what bugs me is when the clerk acts as if I am the person who is somehow at fault for giving the wrong or incorrectly spelled name. Really - don’t you think the customer can spell the last name correctly?</p>