By Any Other Name

My life is not chock full of dramatic reveals or alarming discoveries. My car has never been stolen on the same day that I find out I'm pregnant and the Queen is dropping by for a plot-driven commoner visit. Heck, I've never even been fired. (Guess I better superstitiously knock on wood.) But that didn't stop life from handing me the simplest paradigm-altering three seconds that have since plagued me day in and day out for four years.

My name has been mispronounced my entire life.

Just think on that for a minute. Or two. Or thirty-one million five hundred fifty-seven thousand six hundred and counting. Think of the implications! I have been correcting everyone who has ever mispronounced my name (read: everyone who has ever met me) and now it turns out I was correcting them wrong. Not only that, but my parents have been calling me by a mistake since I was born! How does something this catastrophic happen?

How do I know it's been mispronounced? Let me tell you.

I called for a very mundane bit of customer service and was eventually put through to a representative of Polynesian descent. I could hear it in her prepositions and inflections. I gave her my order number and listened to her type. After a short pause she said, "Ok, Maile" (pronouncing it my-lay instead of my-lee) and then asked for some verifying information. I was speechless. In the merest moment between when she said "my-lay" and the end of her sentence I whirled through a vortex of linguistic argument.

Imagine this playing out in my head: I had been about to politely correct her when her inflections flashed to mind. Her inflections said she was a native English speaker, but one of Polynesian descent, most likely from the Hawaiian islands. Certainly not Maori or from anywhere particularly isolated. Tonga and Samoa could be dismissed almost out of hand. The spelling "Maile" had also not evoked any hesitation, so it was very probable that the word was at least marginally familiar to her. Hawaiian islands are looking really good now.

So. If she is familiar with a Hawaiian noun commonly used as a proper noun, it stands to reason that she is also familiar with the Hawaiian language as a whole. I could argue that "maile" has two pronunciations even among native Hawaiians, but if that is the case, then there's no reason for me to correct her. That calls into question whether I ought to be correcting anyone who pronounces it this way (though she's the first to have done so) if there are two equally accepted pronunciations. But languages don't start out with double pronunciations for a single word, at least not usually. And Hawaiian is renowned as a sort of simple-vowel language, that is, the vowels don't vary in pronunciation willy-nilly like they do in English. The Hawaiian vowels are said the same every time (phonologists, just agree with me for a moment here and don't get all nit-picky, please). No standard variances come to mind, though I admit Hawaiian is not a language I have studied much. The vowel "e" in "maile" should, therefore, be pronounced the same way as the "e" in "ukulele." And of course, by extension, the combination "le" should also be pronounced the same as its double appearance in the latter word.

There it is. Conclusive logical proof that I have been mispronouncing my own name for my entire life. And the customer service rep wants to know about shipping rates? Hang the shipping! I don't know who I am anymore! And the real question here is, what am I supposed to do now?

I could argue linguistics all day long, but that doesn't change the fact that hundreds of people call me "my-lee." It's impractical to think that I'll start correcting all of them and ask them to call me by my linguistically correct name from now on. I wouldn't even know where to start. What's Brian going to do? Start calling me his "my-lay girl"? And what am I supposed to say to my parents? Hey, Mom! Dad! Why'd you call me the wrong name? I mean, it's not as though they were ignorant about it. They didn't walk into a florist and see some random Hawaiian words on the wall and think, hey! That looks cool! Let's call our daughter that! They're from Hawaii! It was reasonable to take their pronunciation as standard. But on the other hand, as a linguist I feel a moral obligation to uphold linguistic standards and not encourage the perpetuation of linguistic errors!

It's just such a dilemma. And to think. If I'd just started out life linguistically correct, my introductions would never have elicited the response, "Oh, like Miley Cyrus?" . . . No. Why would you make that comparison? No. Just no.

Mothers

When Brian was in Afghanistan, I came up with all kinds of interesting ways to pass the lonely time until he returned. One of my more exciting ideas was to purchase a henna tattoo kit and draw henna tattoos on myself and on Brian's sister. In Brian's mother's kitchen. Under her slightly mortified but tolerating eye. There's probably a special place in heaven for Brian's mom for having me as a daughter-in-law.

I drew a Celtic infinity sign on the top side of my foot and a sun design on Brian's sister's arm. Both were simple locations to keep uncovered for the requisite length of time while the henna dried. Brian's mother wince-smiled every time she passed us in the living room drying our fake tattoos. We were several hours in this process while the January snow grew in mounds outside.

As the henna dries, it looks dreadful. We were understandably nervous about the results when it came time to wash the crud off. But! Our henna art was marvelously successful and we were both immensely proud of our handiwork. We called upon siblings and some conveniently visiting neighbors to admire our artwork with us. They cheerfully obliged and half an hour passed in this enjoyable occupation. Even Brian's mother managed a half-hearted grin, though she refrained from any official comment. But about then I had to leave to meet my mother before changing for work.

In the parking lot outside work, my mother handed me some clothes or whatnots I'd left at her house. Still elated with my fake tattoo, I eagerly popped my foot onto the passenger seat of the car where my mother could get a fine view of it. I knew she wouldn't be affectedly proper about a fake tattoo and waited for a minute to hear her commentary. I expected something typically motherish . . . "Very nice, Maile, dear." Something along those lines.

My mother stared at my tattoo while an eye-roll and a smile crept across her face. "Maile," she paused and her head tilted to one side, "child, why are you wearing flip-flops in January?"

Mothers.

Epiphany

I was at a wedding reception where there were also in attendance numerous persons I needed to address as "Aunt." And it suddenly struck me: there really is only one proper pronunciation for "aunt." And it's not the American one. 

"Aunt" is supposed to rhyme with the following list of words

daunt

flaunt

gaunt

haunt

jaunt

vaunt

It is not supposed to rhyme with these words

ant

brant

can't

grant

pant

rant

Note the spellings. Why would every other spelling which includes the four-letter sequence "aunt" be pronounced different from the same four letters standing alone? There really is no room for doubt left. But just in case, I queried my standard reference only to have my concerns confirmed. "Aunt" had only one phonetic spelling: /ɑːnt/. For those who don't study the International Phonetic Alphabet as though it would make a difference to the world, I'll draw your attention to the two stacked dots following the one-story "a." These indicate that the vowel preceding them is the long rather than the short version of the pronunciation. Thus "aunt," not "ant." 

By the by, if your standard reference is Merriam-Webster online with their little sound bite that reads words aloud for you, then I weep.

I filled some four hours or more pondering the history, development, and likely causes of the word's mispronunciation and could really only come up with one conclusion. It being a new year, I resolved myself to pronounce words as they ought to be pronounced. The time is now! One fifteen! I will make a stand! I will say /ɑːnt/ and not /ɑnt/! I will restore balance to the English Language! 

And! I will come up with some sort of solution for everyone I've addressed as "Auntie" all these years. Because nowhere, absolutely nowhere, could I find any linguistic support for a native English speaker to be saying it /ɛnti/. 

P.S. To Brian's sister: Your wedding was lovely and I promise I didn't pass the entire time contemplating the pronunciation of the word "aunt." There was at least one half hour in there where I argued with your cousin over the difference between Sprite and 7UP. She's under the delusive impression that they're the same thing.