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I’ve got one of those names. You know the ones. The ones no one can spell.

And I know that doesn’t make me special. It puts me in good company with Seans and Caitlyns and Philips everywhere. It’s a hazard that was well understood when our parents decided to name us something more unique than “John” or “Mary”.

But I am in an interesting subset of this group. I’m not a Camryn or a Micaylah or a Jazzmun. I actually have good reason to go through life believing that everyone who misspells my name is WRONG.

Rebekah is how it’s spelled in the Bible. She was the wife of Isaac and the mother of Esau and Jacob. (She was infertile for 20 years and then had twins, so she’s a great saint to have on your team if you’re trying to conceive by the way!) If you show up in the book of Genesis, I think it’s a pretty safe to bet that everyone else with your name is named after you.

I’ve never looked up how the spelling “Rebecca” came to be the most common in English. Basically, it’s never really mattered and I don’t really care. Plus, it’s way more fun going through life telling yourself that society has simply marginalized Rebekahs like you for their own cruel and vindictive reasons.

I am aware that spellings like “Rebeca” are correct in languages without a K, (say, Spanish) and I don’t have a problem with that. Now that I think of it, I bet it’s as simple as that Hebrew is a less direct ancestor of English than Latin.

…meh, whatever.

Anyway, I’m also in the Venn Diagram slice of people with hard-to-spell last names. And I know this is common too. But I grew up with a German last name where the vowels make the wrong sounds. People mispronounce my maiden name so often that the instinct is to correct someone if they manage to guess it *right* on the first try!

So you get used to spelling your name a lot, to people who really have no reason to care. You learn to just ask, “Do you need to know how to spell that?” because sometimes it is important (the dentist, the bank, the courthouse!) and sometimes it’s so SO not (a restaurant, the FedEx guy). And you start to be annoyed by people in the latter camp who insist on asking the spelling just so they can get it right for my sake. It’s just extra work for both of us, and after you call us to our table, it won’t matter anymore! By the way, my name is also on my credit card if you’re so curious and are willing to wait a second. But they’re just trying to be nice so you have to be nice too.

I married a guy with a phonetically-correct last name, and I thought my problems would be over. Turns out they’re just different problems. I think everyone probably goes through life spelling their name more often than they’d like, and I should probably just get over it.

Anyway, now the problems I get are the “V as in Victor” one and the “double-R” one. Sometimes I insist on making them do the work just because I’m mean. Sometimes I don’t want to have to spell out the whole thing just because, even after 3.5 years of marriage, I’m still nervous I’ll misspell my own last name.

Which subcategories of name-spelling pitfalls are you coping with?