One of the reasons I took my husband’s name when we got married last century was because it was so much easier to spell.
A lifetime of trying to explain “Maule” to people made Jordan very appealing. Alas, it still manages to stump a surprising percentage of people. “Is that with a ‘G’?” – No! Because then it would be ‘Gordon’ which is actually an entirely different name. I even get “Is that with an ‘O’?” I can virtually guarantee you that every time you see the name “Jordon”, it’s a misspelling.
It’s hard to believe how often one sees one’s name written down in this day and age. On Tuesday I was faced with the conundrum of signing my name in the drug book at work as having checked out various controlled drugs under the name ‘Gordon’, as written by my anaesthetic technician, who to be fair hails from Iran, so getting even that close is pretty impressive. In the end I signed it with my unintelligible scrawl so I’m not expecting any legal blowback.
And that’s just my last name. In one week, here is a random assortment of the various spellings of my first name I have seen:
I suppose it is as Douglas Adam’s nearly said “Never underestimate the ingenuity of fools”. And in the end I’m sure my pain is as nothing to my aforementioned Iranian workmate, whose name I never had the courage to even try to pronounce the entire day, let alone spell. Oop.