To not use proper spellings when naming your child

[Catterpillarsflipflops]

Am I being unreasonable to think it's ridiculous to use a funky spelling of a normal name. I spent today dealing with lost paperwork for a child as the person that took the details didn't think to check the spelling as there is no other spelling of the name.

It looks silly and just causes no end of problems for the child. It also disadvantages them as straight away people get an image of what the child is like.

I've seen

Jaymz
Ezmay
Lil-leigh

Business Idea?

We had a family at school who called all their kids names starting with a particular latter-say L. But they got to the last boy and just called him -L. Head teacher was reading announcements out and said “L Smith is doing ‘something or other” he sighed and said “can I remind everyone to use students full names?” Someone whispered “that IS his name. He sighed even louder and rolled his eyes audibly.

I wonder if they had the same conversations in ancient times as the name spellings evolved??

Best name so far is Feebee. And by the way, did you know Kacper is actually Polish 😂

If that's true it must be outing because it's so unusual. You might want to ask MN to delete your post.

Roobee

I love weird and unusual names but not spelt with a random assortment of letters. As an old editor once said to me, “You have to know the rules of English before you can break them.”

Names I love: Cadogan, Peregrine, Moss, Asha

Names I don’t love: Airwrecka (Erica, poor thing), Mhyke, Phalicia (even more poor thing) and Cynceer.

My number one pet hate is Nevaeh - it seemed to blow up when I was working on the phone line for the registrars. There were dozens of them. I’m sorry if anyone on here has a little Nevaeh but I was always hideously tempted to congratulate the parents on being so open about their Satanism just to release some of the pent-up frustration at hearing it yet again down the phone.

I can see the frustration when working with a lot of names like this.

That said, I intentionally gave my kids traditional first names with only one way to traditionally say and spell them in English because how much my foreign name gets butchered (I've had it both nearly doubled in size in misspellings and I've previously worked places for years, had how to pronounce my name in my email signature, my icon for emails and Teams, and said at the start of any meeting & still was having people get it wrong) and still 3 out of 4 have ended up with their names being butchered at least a few times -- including people adding in random ys.

The next generation started phonics and are now having babies.

Phonics isn't recent. We have school readers used in the 18th century that used phonics to teach reading and many places never stopped using it.

There was a Lettuce at my school with a accent above the U apparently..... name was actually Lettice (le teese if pronouncing it out) she was always having to say my name isn't lettuce!

Not at all.

It shows the parents were absolute morons.

Sinaid . Piotr I think is Peter in Polish

That's the name of my friendly ghost!

I always feel sorry for the little girl I checked into an appointment once. Her name was Amelia but her parents had somehow come up with Ameliayh. I'd understand (slightly) if they'd spelt it Ameliyah but the strange yh at the end has always confused me.

Could be worse they could be using emoticons

You would be amazed how many of them don't know it. It's got to the point that I've gone from "What's your last name?" to "Do you know your last name?" to save time!

It is very much true, but the odds of anyone being able to identify me, given the number of primary schools in the UK, are vanishingly small!

I actually think Emme is ok, it's quite pretty and obvious what it is.

My daughter has an unusual gaelic name, but it is a proper name and is very pretty.

I hate names that are spelled wrong just to be different.

I’ve had conversations with my 8yo about the responsibility of naming her children- she was keen on something like Rainbow Twinkledust or some such shit for her future hypothetical daughter. Even she understood by the end of that they might be better names for her dolls than her future kids. If an 8yo can get it, why can some adults not realise they are not just naming a baby but that person has to deal with a name for years and years.

My favourite has been Nylargh - sounds like someone trying to say their name, but getting murdered halfway through

Kacper is Polish? Every day’s a school day!

Yep. Names like those emanate in chav central.

Might depend on your natural accent tbf (we're northern). But best way I can describe it is first syllable in Kiran sounds like the "ki" in "kid" or "kick" whereas in Keiran the first syllable is two vowel sounds like "Keir" eg the PM "kee-er" even if you say it more quickly the English/Irish name is "Ke-er-un" while Indian (at least Punjabi as her mum would say it) is "Ki-rin" almost

Agree. I wish i wasn’t a snob about it but these weird spellings can make me cringe sometimes.

My DH is called Mark and his sister calls him Marky. Makes my skin crawl.

Is it?
I would pronounce it 'Em'. But it could be Em-meh, Emmie, Eeem, all dependent on how parents want it pronounced.

I get the odd double spelling: Claire/ clare; Lily/Lillie (although if it's the flower, surely lily), but it's a frigging nightmare when you're looking for a lily/Lillie and you've got to work through:
Lillie
Lille
Lileigh
Lill-leigh
Lilyy

And the kid's looking at you as if you're thick, because you didn't realise that this was Lil-ee Jones and not Lil-E Jones.

Same, took me a ridiculous amount of time to realise this poor child has the same name as my child!!