Names Are Important

I have what I consider an easy name, Dana Lange.  Since you are reading this silently to yourself (that is a big assumption on my part, god I hope my of my readers don’t need to read out loud still), but as you read to yourself you have no idea if you pronounce it correctly or not.  It certainly does not matter what in the world you call me in your head as you are reading quietly.

So my names, four-letter first name and five-letter last name, which should be so easy apparently, are not.  Let’s take Dana.  It is pronounced, DANE- UH.  That is like a Danish person with and UH on the end.  I cannot think of one word that actually rhymes with it.  Of course it is not spelled at all like it sounds, but it is also not such an uncommon a name.  The most common mispronunciation is DANNA that rhymes with banana — like DAN with a NA on the end.

Then we get to Lange.  There are some famous Lange’s like Jessica Lange who spells and says her name the same way we do.  Lange that rhymes with hang, sang, rang, bang, got it?  But ninety percent of the time someone who does not know me says my last name they say LANGE that rhymes with Phalange.  Well all the words my name rhymes with do not have an E on the end and Phalange actually contains “Lange”, but in all my years of living I have run across more than just the people I am related to named Lange who all pronounce their name the way I do and not one who says something that rhymes with Phalange.

To top it off I don’t think that most of the people at the checkout or in the call center who butcher my name even know what a phalange is.  So giving them credit for recognizing the “Lange” in phalange is a big stretch.

I write all this because school is getting ready to start up again.  There are a good number of new people who I am going to be welcoming to Carter’s school and when I read their names I am certain that the voice inside my head is pronouncing them incorrectly.  I am a big lover of name-tags since my aging brain is not as good at remembering as it used to be, but now I am getting sensitive about how to even say the name I am reading on the name tag.

I mispronounced a nice woman’s name at church and she was very unhappy about it.  I can’t blame her.  We actually know each other; I am not a telemarketer who is trying to read her name off my computer screen.  So my resolution for this fall is to ask people I meet to please pronounce their name for me.  Not only will it help me remember it, but also hopefully it will prevent me from saying it wrong back to them at some future time.  Names are important.  If they weren’t I would just go ahead and change mine to Banana Phalange.