It's really not exotic, but people have a world of trouble with my first name-- it's rarely pronounced or spelled correctly, even by people who've known me for years.

Also, my last name sounds like our mayor's but is spelled differently, so years ago I just started giving out my name as "Eamon-Daly-E-A-M-O-N-last-name-D-A-L-Y" right off the bat.

My last name is Leon - I think it was my great grandfather's middle name, until he got mad at his father and changed it legally. I get a lot of people assuming I'm going to be either Spanish or Asian. I'm neither.

Does anyone have a name that confounds expectations?

*raises hand*

Is it an asset or a liability?

A bit of both.
Asset: As a scientist, it's great to have an unusual name. People recognize/remember me instantly.
liability: I have to spell my name every time to random folk. If I am shooting the shit with someone at a dive bar, I just make one up.

Tanget - I HATE "rainbaby". I feel like I'm not that at all. I should have gotten maybe "Rain, Baby!" but that's not exactly right either.

I had a friend in college who was adopted from Korea and given a WASP name.

Kim Rosenthal, the Doonesbury character who was adopted from Vietnam and the white Julie Chang character from Seinfeld covered this a lot.

I like having an "unusual" name and my epigram is a very fine one. However, I find that for sites like this one and whatnot, I've "created" a "Trisha Lynn" persona that tries not to be Asian until I need to be, which may or may not make sense.

I have a Greek last name by marriage (but short, and not necessarily recognizable as Greek by most, though definitely some kind of ethnic), and a first name that seems Latina or Italian, so, yeah - most people don't expect my blond German/Irish-heritage self.

oh - asset or liability? For me, neither. The only asset part is that my married last name is much easier than my family name, and I thank Zeus it's not one of those polysyllabic Greek last names that nobody but the Greeks can pronounce.

My unusual family name has been found all over the world. The name appears in the UK (where my ancestors are from, and where a great many distant cousins still live), Russia, India, Hungary, Lithuania, Australia, etc. This is in addition to the extensive family here in the US.

Every year me or my wife will be on the phone with some business and will get something like, "I know some people with that name. Are you related to [x]?" and usually are related.

Still, even though the name is spelled exactly how it sounds, I have to spell it every single time. In addition, I was a cruel father who gave both daughters names that have to be spelled, so they are double-jammed.

My name has as many consecutive consonants as Nietszche, and motherfuckers have laughed while trying to say my name since I was a kid. So what, you can't pronounce it. Don't laugh at my fucking name. It makes you a little anxious to have to stumble over it, and you have some laughing defense mechanism? So what? So you ask, "Hey, how do you pronounce it?" Make a joke of my name and goddamnit you have me wishing it was three centuries ago and nobody would blink if I popped you in the chin or got my musket and took your grin off. Fuckers will make a Mike Fink out of me yet. Don't laugh at my name or I'll knife you.

I pronounce it like "Huge Anus" haha!

Oh man. I've been waiting my whole life for this thread.

My friends have known me as "Andy" since about my 13th birthday, but that is my middle name.

My first name is the Arabic name Naim, which, to the American eye, is comically indistinguishable from the noun "name."

"Wait a second... your name is 'name??'"

I can't tell you how many times I've had to put up with that reaction. When I was a child it was always accompanied by laughter and/or ass whippings.

Good luck using an umlaut or reaching for comparisons like Anais or even phonetic spellings. Nye-eem. It's not quite right... It fucking sucks. I gave it up. Like your doctor, I don't have an exotic appearance to back it up, either. So there you go.

Nowadays, the people who know me best can use my true first name. They have gotten used to how it's pronounced, and some take to it more than others. It's a sign of intimacy if someone uses that name for me now. And needless to say, I am never made fun of or beaten up over it anymore.

My default "Andy" works great 99% of the time but I have a secret name too which is quite beautiful in sound and meaning. It's a conversation piece. I don't shun it anymore.

I pronounce it like "Huge Anus" haha!

Oh that name! I've been trying forever to get people to say "You Janice" but to no avail.

You know I actually used to think about pen names because I figured people would never buy a book by an author whose name they couldn't pronounce? I still think that's kinda true, but not enough to matter, and anyway who's gonna buy a book that hasn't even been written yet?

I got in trouble in middle school for telling this kid with a mellifluous Irish last name who was laughing at mine and making fun of how unpronounceable it was that his surname wasn't special at all, in fact it meant his family came from a bog and stole turf for a living until starvation led them to straddle the road all the way to America. He went home and told his father and there was a conference in the principal's office where I had to apologize for telling the truth, sure.

I get pretty lippy sometimes.

I have a very francophone, particularly Québecois name -- first and last.

I was raised in English Canada (outside Quebec).

No one in my family, in my lifetime, has been francophone, or even knew how to speak French. In fact, no one living seems to even know who or when was the last ancestor with a French mother tongue.

I live in Quebec.

Hilarity ensues. (Actually, it's both a good and a bad thing.)

* I get a lot -- a *LOT* -- of remarks like, "Your name is so French... how can you be anglophone??" I get this almost every time I give my name to a francophone. These are always very friendly, though sometimes a bit tedious. (My response is always very deferential, ie. "I know, I'm sorry! It's my family's fault!")

* I think that my family name lends me a tiny bit of insider status here in Quebec.

It's very difficult to explain how this works without spending years in this very weird society, but in very crude terms, in Quebec, as an non-francophone you are always an outsider. It's even worse if you weren't born here. My name, when seen on paper, might help me get slightly nicer treatment. Essentially, it exposes roots that make me in some very distant, very small way "one of us". (For example, I suspect this is true when applying for jobs and dealing with government agencies.)

(* Also helpful is that I grew up in an Acadian-settled province, which is the country's only bilingual province, and which is still 35% Acadian. The Québecois feel an affinity with the Acadians, and generally like New Brunswick, so I benefit from that good will when I am apologizing for being a big fat anglo.)

Cultural tightrope, I walks it.

Hah! I am so not my name! My first name is English and my last name is Dutch and people expect to see a pretty European, not my black African self!

My name's a bog standard Yorkshire name, but it's spelt in a variety of ways and it's close enough to the words "bum fluff" to make my school days slightly more miserable.

Interestingly, the g/f also has a very Yorkshire name. I looked it up, and it originates only a mile away from where she lives. In fact - you can see the geological feature that spawned her name from her house. This wouldn't be suprising until you realize that her father bought the name over from the Caribbean, and according to family history, it's the name of the plantation his ancestors were forced to work on. I've looked it up on the internet & there's a guy who was deported to America for being the wrong religion in the 17th Century. They indentured him (to pay for his travel) to work in the Caribbean for four years.

Eh, my name is pretty plain. No, it's not pronounced like the baseball player. Yes, there are two double consonants. No, you missed one, on my chart there. More to the point, folks just plain see me as "black" and so are surprised that I'm also Irish and German (among other things). Whenever I go into an Irish gift store type place, I usually get mistaken for a culture tourist rather than someone with a pretty good idea of what I'm looking at/for.

Never really a big deal but I've occasionally had people surprised that I was a white guy. I have a very common anglo- last name (almost as common as Smith or Jones) and an uncommon old-fashioned first name. When I was working on the Obama campaign last year some of the older guys were ribbing me about it, "you sound like one of us".

Slight derail, Eideteker, did you know about these?

I find it strange that people always assume that I am Jewish from my last name. I mean, yeah, I am Jewish. But my last name is extremely uncommon (everyone with it is realted to me, and my family is small) and doesn't end in "stein" or "berg" or anything else tell-tale, so I can never figure out how people guess that.

Eideteker, my wife is in the same boat. Mixed black and (white) Jewish, so folks are suprised when she pronounces challah correctly.

She's is quite exotic looking, with multiple visible tattoos and a somewhat gothic fashion sense.

Her name is Tiffany.

She considers it a liability, mostly. Many, many times, she's made an appointment over the phone, at a doctor's office, or for a job interview, only to encounter utter confusion when she arrives.

Slight derail, Eideteker, did you know about these?

I did! Never got around to ordering anything from them, though.

Eideteker, my wife is in the same boat. Mixed black and (white) Jewish, so folks are suprised when she pronounces challah correctly.

Challah atcha boy!

The name that appears on my birth certificate is "Danny."

All I could get from my parents was that it seemed like a good idea at the time. It's caused me a lot of hassle, mostly from counterpeople here and there who do not believe that "Danny" is my legal name.

No one calls me Danny.

I have a relatively common, easy-to-spell surname, and a you-were-born-in-the-70s-weren't-you first name.

To top that off, I apparently have a face that everyone knows. I can't tell you how many people have come up to me over the years to claim they know me or to say that they know someone who looks Just Like Me.

So I guess I'm so middle-of-the-road as to be invisible. But I like hyphens. That I do.

My last name is "Moon," so often, people expect me to be Korean. Instead I'm of Irish descent (mixed with various other caucasian mutt varities). This is not a big deal but occasionally results in a double take of surprise at job interviews and such.

I also get credit-card invites from Korean Airlines, but I can't read them, so I don't know how the rates and benefits are.

I used to work in a secondary school in a very New Canadian-heavy community. Most students were of Southeast Asian, African-American, Caribbean or African origin. The first few weeks were fun as I would call up a teacher asking to see Laktisha Washington only to be greeted by a blond, or have Jade Lee Choi appear with no physical Asian characteristics. And the huge number of D'Souzas and Fernades I have dealt with make me now automatically assume the person is from a former Portuguese settlement in India. Personally, I have a very unusual last name with only four people in Canada with it (yes, we are all related) and an uncommon first name (I've only met one other person in 35 years with the same first name). Yet, though googling I discovered there was a girl in BC in 1915 with my exact name. I never could find out what happened to my doppleganger.

Nobody, nobody can spell my last name correctly. Even when I spell it, they still can't spell it. NO! THERE IS NO "C" IN IT! YES! THERE IS AN EXTRA "S" THERE!! How they hear a "C" when I do not say one I have no idea, but it happens constantly.

When I bought a condo, the lawyer gave city hall the correct spelling for the deed but the people there recorded it wrong, which has caused lots of unnecessary paperwork and aggravation since then. Apparently the name was much longer back in 19th century Germany, but someone decided to remove a couple of extra S's and C's, and an E or two.

I was raised in ground-zero 1970s feminist territory, where at age 9 we had fierce debates about whether women should keep their maiden names when they got married. I said I was SO changing my name so as to not deal with the spelling anymore, and was criticized for not being enlightened, "true to myself", etc. etc.

Plane tickets. Booking a flight or shopping online. Man, I have to misspell my name in bastard ways everywhere and it annoys me to no end. Aaaargh. Peoples assumptions that my name is misspelled or not legal here bug me.

Also, my first name sounds like "thunder" in Swedish which amused the hell out of people back in the day when I wouldn't be caught dead without loud huge knee-high motorcycle boots. "KLOMP KLOMP KLOMP* Oh here comes "Thunder"!

It's actually a very soft name, it means wish.