A woman has blasted her parents for giving her a name so unusual that she’s never met anyone else with it — and people say they should have thought it through better
A woman has slammed her parents for giving her a ‘tragic’ name that has caused her nothing but trouble in life. She explained how her mum wanted to name her Olivia but dad wanted to give her a “more unique name”, leading to them compromising on the spelling of this moniker.
She said on Reddit’s tragedeigh, which is the online term given name that has been “deliberately misspelled or completely made up to appear more unique than it actually is”,.: “Changed the spelling to Olivyah. It’s also pronounced different, it’s pronounced ‘o-liv-yah’ not ‘o-liv-ee-ah’. Like Every time my nan or someone pronounced my name wrong my father would go nuts correcting them, always putting emphasis on the ‘yah’ part.
“Because apparently it’s very important, like the ‘yah’ from ‘Yahweh’ which is another name for Jesus or something.”
Growing up, she says she “hated” how she couldn’t find her name on anything due to its usual spelling – and now she’s older, she says she gets weird looks over its spelling.
She added: “I hated my name being spelt different because it meant I couldn’t find my name on anything, in a time where just about every kid in my primary school had pencil cases and stuff with their names on it.
“And where key chains with your name on it where really popular souvenirs. Every time we went on holidays my brothers could get cool things with their names on it, but I never could. I hated it.
“The only upside was I knew when someone I knew closely called my name because they’d pronounce it correctly unlike everyone else.”
Commenting on her post, one user said: “Your dad sounds exhausting to be around. If I was you, I’d change it to Olivia and never look back.”
Another user added: “I live in the American South where we’re known for having hard accents and actually we tend to pronounce Olivia the way your dad wanted it – 3 syllables instead of 4.”
A third user said: As a parent who named their son ‘Olyver’ no, I actually like it. It’s unique, but I can see how your parents stressing the pronunciation would get old.
“We pronounce his name Oliver and mostly just call him Oly. If you really hate it, is there an abbreviation you don’t hate?
“I considered spelling it ‘Olivyr’ or some other variation, but wanted to avoid a tragedeigh.”
One more user added: “Yes it is definitely a tragedeigh and honestly those two pronunciations are not meaningfully different in everyday speech so that adds an extra layer of stupid
“If I say them as quickly as I talk in everyday speech, they sound pretty much exactly the same.”
