On having a surname that no one can pronounce.
Although people have tried, bless them.
WEE-AY-ELD?WADDLE?WAY-EL-DA?
My personal favourite was something along the lines of ‘valkyrie’ at a poetry reading. My cheeks may have risen to an odd shade of scarlet.
I’ve been asked where I originate from (really the UK), and stopped at border controls (although I feel like this may be more due to my passport photo, in which I look vaguely like a pre pubescent six year old boy with a neat pudding bowl crop).
One of the classic moments was during a school register, with Miss calling out each of our names one by one, calling everyone’s first name and their surname. Of course she reached my name in the list and paused for a moment, gave me a quick glance, and left it at Liv. Sometimes it is clearly better to act blasé and breeze over it than give out an awkward mouthful.
I know plenty of other people experience the same issue, tricky surnames aren’t a rare occurrence. I think mine maybe does climb a little higher than the others, mainly as no one (not even myself) seems to be wholly sure how it is spelt. The original surname includes the German letter A-Umlaut – Ä. Those pesky little dots cause a whole lot of trouble, through the pronunciation, which differs from the standard A to a more stringent AY. The struggle arises when moving across continents, between countries that don’t fully share the same alphabet. The question of how my German surname is translated is a rather tricky one. Some of my cousins have dropped half the lettering anyway for a nice well rounded Wald.
The Ä can traditionally be subbed in with AE in English, for the same sort of sound. However the pairing of these two vowels does seem to be difficult for some to comprehend. Therefore my parents did both occasionally drop even the E for just plain old Walde – as it states on all my credit cards and passports. Unfortunately I’ve been programmed to sign my surname WAELDE, which has resulted in a few sticky situations at visa inspections when travelling, when I’m unable to even sign my own name correctly.That being said, there isn’t a whole lot that I can do now.
Plus my go-to running dad joke involves raising a quizzical eyebrow when asked how to pronounce my surname. The waggish response of ‘it’s like WELL-DONE. Without the UN’, would surely go amiss.I’m just going to continue on my hunt to marry a man whose surname begins with a G.
Who wouldn’t want their initials to be O-M-G anyway?