Unless I'm in Wisconsin, everybody pronounces my last name wrong. Sometimes I correct people, sometimes not.

It's weird when I tell someone my last name and 30 seconds later they're pronouncing it wrong.

I rarely find anyone to pronounce my first name properly - but I can usually get them to pronounce my last name properly, i.e., the way my family pronounces it. (However other families with the same name may do it.)

Sure, ita !, but please correct me should we meet F2F again.

One of my friend's friends is Italian -- born in Sicily and lives in Italy-Italian. She speaks impeccable English, but her accent renders my real first name into something so lovely and charmimg...I love it.

(She made me read Latin to her when she discovered I'd studied it, and about laughed till she cried. I was all "Rita, it's a DEAD LANGUAGE!"

She replied "If it were not dead, you certainly would have murdered it!" and went off into peals of more laughter. I wasn't offended.)

Name pronunciation always amuses me when listening to local newscasters. They will read the entire news story with perfect nondescript broadcasting accent, until they get to the person's name. Then full on Latino pronunciation. Which is proper in my mind, but a stark contrast to the accent used in the rest of the story.

It is important to me that I pronounce names correctly, and am often told I am the 'only one' that gets a name right. Yet when I had a more difficult to pronounce name it didn't bother me at all when people mangled it.

On the L home this evening, several young women got on and I heard them pronounce Wabash as "wuh-BASH". I snorked and thought of you guys.

It's WA-Bash, right?

sumi, I think I have a handle on your first name from other similarly-named friends (the key thing is that in Japanese, syllables are pretty evenly emphasized, so not su-MEEE-ko like English default emphasis would have it?, or am I totally messing that up?) but I realize have no clue if your last has an E sound or an A sound. And let me know if I'm not vagueing it up enough.

I heard some folks from back east talking about things they were going to see on vacation and how some friends had said "The Mo-jave Desert was lovely." I thought real hard and said, "Do you mean the 'Mo-hav-ee' Desert?" "There's no H in it!"

I made two of my regular authors my fans for life by pronouncing their last names correctly: Akyildiz and El-Hawary (ah-KYILL-deez and El-Howree (sorta)).

I started going by my middle name (Elizabeth) because I got sick of people mispronouncing my first name (Leone). This summer I'm making it legal and switching first and middle.

I try really hard to pronounce names the way their owners want. It matters.

I have a friend who apparently doesn't mind the standard (at least in our office) Americanization of her name, because for the life of me, I can't even hear how she says it herself. It's so awkward! I listen so hard, and can't figure out how I would reproduce what she's saying. And don't get me started on the transliteration -- it makes literally no sense.