• Admiral Patrick@dubvee.org
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    17 days ago

    “Breighdone” (Brayden) is probably the most egregious one I haven’t brain-bleached yet.

    My friend works in the billing department of a local hospital, and she will occasionally text me some crazy spellings she comes across.

    • TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee
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      16 days ago

      yeah that’s literally a HIPAA violation lol

      esp if the spelling is that unique, it’s definitely identifying info

      • rhombus@sh.itjust.works
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        15 days ago

        It probably would get her in some hot water, but a first name alone is a gray area. It becomes a definite violation if it’s combined with health information, even as simple “a baby was born here with the name X”. If she just says “I saw a name spelled X” then it may not be a violation of the law, but the hospital would probably still can her for it.

    • otter@lemmy.zip
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      17 days ago

      I’ve seen that as La-ah. Somehow La-a is so much worse.

    • Akasazh@feddit.nl
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      15 days ago

      The first time I read that it was le-a , which could be read as lea without the dash

      • Justdaveisfine@midwest.social
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        16 days ago

        Yeah the other reply noted the same thing. This would have been about ~2015 and she was in pre-k so someone must have named their kid based on the legend. I can’t recall if the girl was black or not but I don’t think she was.

      • GoodLuckToFriends@lemmy.today
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        15 days ago

        I’ve seen one in real life. Maybe they just carried a fake id card as a joke, but this was in a billing department so I’m assuming it was real.

  • ReiRose@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    T’Fanny for Tiffany. She’s about 30 now, so that was a bad decision from a long time ago.

  • Krudler@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    Not so much the spelling, just… I went to school with a girl who’s father fled the law and they ended up near us in Canada… they were originally from a trailer park in Tennessee

    Her name was “Dollarina”

  • adhocfungus@midwest.social
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    17 days ago

    There’s a girl in my kid’s class named Eighmee. Pronounced “Amy”. I thought it was weird but there’s a street in a neighboring town named Eighmee Street.

      • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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        17 days ago

        Ah the original working name for the villain of 101 Damnations. Jew Ellie DeVille. That was Walt’s contribution.

    • CoolMatt@lemmy.ca
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      16 days ago

      Once had a friend who said she had 3 middle names. Then she said what I thought I heard as Julianne. I thought she was joking and laughed at her joke.

      Then she got mad, called me stupid, then clarified that her 3 middle names were Jewel Lee Ann.

      I still thought she was joking. She was not.

      • Ziglin (it/they)@lemmy.world
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        15 days ago

        I have a friend with three middle names too but he seemed used to people being confused and just told me where they came from.

  • cobysev@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    I knew a guy once whose last name was “EA.” Two capital letters. He pronounced it “Yeah.” His first name was Rodrake.

  • wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works
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    16 days ago

    I would like to provide a counterexample. There are plenty of these people in the US intermountain west, but there are at least some cases where there is no one at fault. Next time you see one of these names without context (though we clearly have the context in this case), before judging, consider Nariaw:

    I am a teacher, and one year I found that my roster included a student named “Nariaw”. As a public school, we register your student based on what’s on the birth certificate. I ask all of my students to pronounce their names for me when I first meet them, for the reason we see in so many of the replies here and with shit like “abcde”. However, when this girl came to my class, she said her name was pronounced “Miriam”. I spent a good twenty seconds looking at my roster, and had to ask her to spell it for me. I didn’t ask any rude and impertinent questions at that point, so it wasn’t until a few months later that I got the full story:

    Her mother, an immigrant from Ethiopia, was still unfamiliar with Latin script when her daughter was born here in the US. So when she attempted to write out the name, which she wanted to transliterate as “Mariam”, she ended up writing only half of the first M, and wrote the second one upside-down. Whoever did the data entry for the government records dutifully recorded the child’s name as “Nariaw”. Was the mother at fault for being expected to write a name which, while she knew how to represent it in Amharic, she was forced to write in a language in which she was illiterate?

    • milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee
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      16 days ago

      Wow. Yeah, definitely good to be gracious in that situation!

      Another is, some cultures, not too far from home - like Irish and Welsh - have names written in ways that look Traighdiegh to English, but are the correct/traditional way to spell it for that culture.

    • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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      16 days ago

      That’s super frustrating. The hospital should have easily been able to get someone who had at least a basic grasp of a common language to help ensure they understood the forms and got them filled out correctly.

      The fault is 100% with the hospital.

      • wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works
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        16 days ago

        I would argue that at least 15% of the blame lies with the racist expectation in the US that all names need be anglicized, when we have fucking Unicode. If someone whose second language is English can be expected to be able to pronounce “Rayleigh Monaghan McTavish”, then the least that the anglophone people of the US could do is learn to pronounce things in a few other common languages. There is, quite simply, no excuse for the government of the united States, in which there is no official language (even though a traitor, invalidated by the insurrection clause of the 14th amendment, had some fuckwit draft a document trying to declare it without congressional approval), to mandate the use of a single language.