There are a lot of silly, nit-picky, ridiculous things that upset me. I hate it when I share my toothpaste with someone and they squeeze it from the middle. I get infuriated if someone leaves toast crumbs in the butter. If you leave the toilet seat up in the middle of the night, I will kill you. And if you get my drink order incorrect whilst wearing a Starbucks apron, I will curse the day you were born.

I care about having silverware arranged correctly on the table. I hate when people end sentences with prepositional phrases (and sink into self-loathing when I do so).  I need for the volume on the TV and stereo to be set on an even number.

But there’s something I don’t care much about: the way my name is pronounced.

Some people fly into a rage if you mispronounce their names.  They will sneer and pronounce their names the way they prefer with a condescending air of superiority that makes everyone feel stupid for reading the name incorrectly. They show no grace, despite fact there are numerous popular pronunciations.

I’m not one of them.

I will admit that I was mildly annoyed when the Starbucks barista handed me the cup in the following picture:

Frankly, I was annoyed because Niomi isn’t an actual name. I didn’t want anyone to think my parents were crazy hippies with the need to channel their creativity through spelling a perfectly normal name in a completely ridiculous way.  But, had the barista pronounced my name NYomi or NAYomi, I would have picked up my drink, without saying a word, and strolled out of Starbucks unperturbed.

For 23 years, I have been living with two first names.

NAYomi?

NYomie?

Which is it?

I’ve never bothered to correct anyone. My parents call me NAYomi, so I suppose that’s my “real” name, but my mum’s accent occasionally makes it sound more like NEEomi. It didn’t help matters that my mum’s side of the family tended to call me NYomi, while my dad’s side proliferated NAYomi. To further the confusion about my name, on the first day of school I was always too shy to respond to the teacher’s first run through the attendance with anything more than a nod or a wave of my hand. Until I was about 14, I would have rather died than speak up in front of a room of silent classmates. The teacher could have called me Bob and I would have gone with it. Every year I deferred to the teacher’s pronunciation of my name, and every year the kids in my class followed my teacher’s lead.  Thus, my friends are almost equally divided between the NAYomi and NYomi pronunciations.

I should probably care about how my name is pronounced, but I don’t. In grade school, I was the fat kid with the last name Hogg. As long as nobody was connecting those dots, I could have cared less about what they called me. Beggars cannot be choosers! It just seems really unnatural that I have no preference; neither pronunciation resonates more deeply within me. I don’t hear one as “right” and one as “wrong.” They’re both my name.

Still, it’s been troubling that I don’t have a preferance. I recently met someone who asked me, “NAYomi? or is it NYomi?  Which do you prefer?”  I realized it was completely ludicrous to reply, “Oh, it doesn’t matter. Either way.”  It’s my name, for goodness sakes!

The thing that makes me reticent to decisively pick one pronunciation over the other is the fact I’d have to start correcting people that have known me for more than 10 years. It seems like it would be an overly burdensome – and possibly rude (?) – thing to start now.  Do I pick a pronunciation and leave a grandfather clause for those who met me before I chose?   Or, should I adopt one of my many nicknames and vehemently proliferate it at every opportunity presented, desperately hoping that it catches on?  It might be fun to be NJ, Mimi, or Mia for a while.

Although, I suppose that would lead to confusion about whether my name should be pronounced ME-ah or MY-ah…