When my parents lived in NYC before I was born, they read this comic strip by the very funny Lynda Barry. It was called Marlys and centered around a girl named Marlys (mar-LISS) and her friends and family. My dad read it MAR-lees (pronounced as though Marly had a a dog; Marly's dog) and fell in love with the character and the [mispronounced] name. Marlys herself is a spitfire of a girl; she's obnoxious and bossy and eccentric and kind of gets on everyone's nerves. What more could a parent want, right? So when I was born, they decided to name me after that comic strip character but change the spelling to match what my dad thought the name was. Thus, my name was born, and so started a life time of explaining how to pronounce it.
Both my siblings also have out of the ordinary names with more normal middle names. These, my mom says, were given to us so that just in case we wanted something less... weird. While my name is kind of a pain, because about 1 in 10 people say it right the first time (One of my best friends spent a year avoiding saying it because she was scared she'd get it wrong), I would never in a million years think of changing it, not even dropping the s! And if I were to alter something, it would be to give myself a more unique middle name, just so everything would match! My name is a huge part of who I am, it's a story to tell, even when the explanations get tiresome. I always find the "how I got my name" stories interesting. People can shape how I feel about a name too, so names I love simply because of who I associate them with. A rose by any other name would only smell as sweet if we never knew that it had been called a rose!
Both my siblings also have out of the ordinary names with more normal middle names. These, my mom says, were given to us so that just in case we wanted something less... weird. While my name is kind of a pain, because about 1 in 10 people say it right the first time (One of my best friends spent a year avoiding saying it because she was scared she'd get it wrong), I would never in a million years think of changing it, not even dropping the s! And if I were to alter something, it would be to give myself a more unique middle name, just so everything would match! My name is a huge part of who I am, it's a story to tell, even when the explanations get tiresome. I always find the "how I got my name" stories interesting. People can shape how I feel about a name too, so names I love simply because of who I associate them with. A rose by any other name would only smell as sweet if we never knew that it had been called a rose!
