QotD: Also Known As
What other names did your parents consider for you?
If I was a boy, I believe I would have been named Mark Ulrich.
Not sure what other girl names they were thinking of.
Update: I learned from my mom that she wanted to name me Julie or Julia because I was born in July. My dad really liked the name Stephanie.
I know they really liked Melanie, which is my middle name. Had my father known that "Heike" is so damn hard to pronounce in America, I'm sure he would have insisted on naming me something else. Heike is actually the name of my dad's first girlfriend, which is a little weird. My mom loved the name, and having grown up around a bunch of German-American's it never really occurred to her that others might have trouble pronouncing my name. They gave up with using ethnic names the second time around (we had already moved to the States) and named my sister Nicole, which is practically impossible to butcher.
Prononciation is a funny thing - When I meet people for the first time, and I'm worried that they are going to forget my name 5 seconds after I say it, I over-pronounce an "A" at the end, out of fear that they will forget my name and call me Heiki - UGH, it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up!
I give Adam crap when he misprounces it, because I feel that at the very least my husband and family should be able to say it correctly!!! I remember it being a hard thing to bring up with my in-laws. They have already forgotten in, and I've resigned myself to them never saying it correctly - which makes me a little sad.
I'm always torn over who I should correct and at what point its appropriate to say, "By the way, you pronounce my name wrong". When I was younger, I tended to do it pretty quickly with people I was dating, because I thought it would make things easier around my parents if my boyfriend was at least pronouncing my name correctly. I didn't start correcting friends until recently - I don't think I ever did it in high school and rarely in college. It's probably the hardest to tell friends, because no matter when you do it, they always feel like you waited to long and they feel bad for having inadvertently mispronounced my name all this time....
OK - I went off on a tangent that was completely off point fropm the QotD - Time to get some work done.
