Thursday, February 19, 2009

How Do You Spell It? Let Me Count The Ways!

When we chose names for our boys we wanted names that could be shortened or lengthened, depending on what we felt led to call them at the time, or what society chose to call them. I have a name like that. I was born Kimberly. My family called me Kimberly or Kimmy up until I started school, at which point my name immediately got shortened to Kim. (Why do teachers do that? I hear it happening where I work all the time and it drives me crazy . . . ) In Grade 5 I insisted that the entire school call me Kimberly. It didn't fly, so I gave up on that idea and I've pretty much been Kim ever since. However, in the bloggy world and among my closest friends and family, I am often called Kimmy. I like it.

The boys I named are Mitchell and Tyrone. I did not participate in naming my step-son, but oddly enough, his name is also one that can be shortened or lengthened--Thomas. We've never called him Tom or Tommy. To me he's always been Thomas. However, his middle name is James, so prior to my arrival on the scene, he was known as T.J. About the time that I became part of his life, he was asking to be called Thomas, so I've never known him as T.J. He's always has and always will be Thomas to me.

I am finally get to the point of my post, which is this: Mitchell's name is getting butchered. I cannot understand why his name is misspelled so often. Here are the ways I've noticed it being spelled by other people in the past few months: Michelle (uhhh . . . that's Michelle, a name for a girl!); Mitchel (this is the most common misspelling); Michell; Mich; Mitche; Michele; Micshell. There is also another way to spell Mitchell's name, which I've never actually seen anyone do for him, but it's when you replace the "i" with a "y" and I personally think it looks ridiculous. Mytchell.

10 years ago when we were choosing a name for our first-born, I never dreamed that "Mitchell" would cause so much chaos in the spelling world. I thought it was a pretty straight-forward, easy-to-get-it-right-the-first-time-around name. Apparently I was wrong.

Ty's name creates an issue every now and then as well, but only when an "e" is added to the end of Ty, which makes it Tye. I thought about starting that spelling back when he was younger, but it just didn't look right to me. Ty's name can also be spelled Tie, as in Tie Domi, an NHL hockey player, but we didn't really want to name him after Tie Domi. The "rone" of Tyrone's name is rarely used, even by our family. A lot of people don't even know that his full name is Tyrone. We've been calling him Ty pretty-much from the day he was born.


10 comments:

Kim said...

Hi Kim, I've always wanted to be Kimberly too, but it just never seemed to work and now it would just sound weird. I have been Kimmy till I was five and moved away from my extended family, but to this day when I go to visit they still call me Kimmy (I've grown up, really I have!)
As for our boys, I won't ever shorten their names but they may chose to later. So far everyone uses their whole name. I have often wondered if we have made a mistake with Stephen. The ph sounds more like a v so people say is name wrong sometimes, but I think it looks better with a ph to me.
Is Mitchell bothered by the misspelling? Crazy things we worry about hey!

Kimmy said...

Kim: No, Mitchell is not bothered by the misspelling; it's just a mom thing I think. As for the spelling of Stephen--I like it better with a ph than with a v.

~Rain``` said...

We knew we would be forever spelling our daughter's name the moment we selected it. Also, some people have a lot of problem pronouncing her middle name. Poor girl. Oh well... we like the names!

Chris said...

I was pretty purposeful when choosing our boys names... Evan and Kyle are pretty hard to spell wrong, and they are short enough to spell and say quickly, and don't have miserable obvious nicknames (as far as I'm aware).

Christine however, is a different story. There are way too many ways to spell it. I was named with the intent to shorten to Christy, which I was called until I developed an attitude in gr7. Then it was just Chris, which stuck and still suits. When I moved to S'toon before getting married, I tried to go by Christine at work, but it was Horrible. Didn't feel right at ALL. I'll never do that again. phew.

Stacey said...

Mitchell's name makes total sense to me. Even shortened, I can only see it as Mitch. Those people are just not thinking!

Beba said...

Hi Kim
Your post made me smile. My daughter's name is Daria, but oddly, for some reasons, most people, here in Serbia call her DariJa or, when they write her name, they write it with J inside. I have no idea why, but i don't like that. It changes her name.

The Walker Family said...

Hi Kimmy,
Yes, we are expecting. We haven't posted it officially due to me just hitting the 12 week mark this week...so yeah, a bit of a surprise, but a very good one. We are excited and can't wait to meet this little person approx. on Sept.8. :)

The Walker Family said...

Oh no Kim, you didn't make an uncomfortable situation at all...no way, my blog is highly uninteresting or something, hardly anyone goes there, so I just hadn't made a big deal about it on the blog yet. :) Thanks so much for reading it though and for your comments :). Take good care!

Anonymous said...

Hi Kim-I'm Jeff from York, Pa. I have always been happy with the names we chose for our 2 teen boys-now 16 and 18. Jordan Carl (Carl after my stepfather), and Joshua William (William after my wife's father. Neat idea for a post. Sometime visit my site at 55blahblah.blogspot. I am going to link to yours.

Anonymous said...

With a last name that is never spelled right (even the bank gets it wrong more often than not) we thought we'd name our boys with good solid easy names, too. The only one people have trouble with is Titus, just because it's a name that just isn't used very much. Despite that, Luke is the one whose name is usually misspelled - Luc. Drives him nuts!