Getting Names Wrong
I often have difficulty in remembering people’s names – to a weird degree – and I wonder if it’s my subconscious enacting revenge for the fact that my name is often mispronounced. It’s Smyth to rhyme with Life; but I generally get – at least until I correct it, which I usually don’t – Smith, or the near-miss of Smythe. When I worked as a teacher in a very rough-and-tumble secondary school in London in the 90s, 8P used to regularly call me ‘Mr Smurf,’ with all the respect that this implies.
I had a parcel delivered last week with this address label:
It looks like a case of inverted letters set by a letter-press compositor – someone slotting metal letters in upside down – but that can’t be, as they’ve used a laser printer. Whatever happened, I like it: the experience of seeing one’s name, long settled into inevitability (how could it have been anything else?), is joyfully scrambled into something else. Is this me or not me? Things don’t have to be as they are!
A little while ago I had another letter, this time scrambling both my first name and address.
My own happy travails sit within a wider field of misspelt names. Here’s the 1609 first quarto edition of Pericles by Shakespeare and George Wilkins – the printers employed by publisher Henry Gosson got the name of Pericles’ daughter, Marina, wrong on the title-page.
And here’s a related bibliographical moment. To most if not all copies of her 1668 Plays Never Before Printed (1668), the brilliant writer and scientist Margaret Cavendish pasted in thin slips of paper next to particular scenes or songs with the note 'Written by my Lord Duke' – attributing those parts to her husband, William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle.
Evidently the attribution mattered to Cavendish – did she like a sense of marriage-as-collaborative-writing? – and she probably had sheets printed with repetitions of this note, which she then cut up and stuck in: correct naming as something belated, layered on top of a text, and a matter of scissors and glue.
My husband’s surname is Bratby which gets mangled surprisingly frequently to Bradbury and Bradley. It reminded me too of the Imogen/Innogen controversy in Cymbeline. So interesting, thanks!
Thanks for this, Adam - I sympathise! We are Wikeley pronounced Like-ly, but most people go for "Wik-er-ley" if they haven't heard better, and the more the world becomes text based the harder it becomes to hold the line. The original spelling was probably Wykeley. I wonder if there's something going on here with accents and vowel shifts... (Wykeley's/Wikeley is originally a midlands name).