January 17, 2023
There was an article yesterday’s paper about a ninth-grader who won a scholarship for writing a poem about people who didn’t pronounce her name correctly. She attributed it to the name being an unusual Black name instead of a traditional White name, and berated White people for trying to force Black people to use their type of name, and she assumed that people were making microaggressions by pronouncing it wrong. And if they did it repeatedly, she was probably right. However…
I knew a White woman named Jeanne, who used to get extremely insulted that some people who saw her name written out mispronounced it (Je-anne, Jeannie, etc.), and some people who only heard her name misspelled it (Jean, Gene…). It was simply a name they hadn’t encountered before, but she didn’t want to hear that.
This girl’s name is Couryn. So, how DO you pronounce it? Is the “ou” sound like house, coumadin, or cousin? Cowryn, Cooryn, Cuhryn, CorYNN…? Although she shouldn’t have to correct people repeatedly, one mispronunciation isn’t really a microaggression.
To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes a mispronunciation is just a mispronunciation.
July 13, 2023
For an extreme example of this, watch Patrick Stewart on "Star Trek: The Next Generation". He was famous for mispronouncing names.
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