Our daughter Ana is a swimming instructor and before class began she took a roll call in front of the children and their parents and as she called out the name "Shawntel" she looked at a little black boy and directed her question towards him, "Is your name Shawntel?" "No", the child replied, "My name is Brian." Naturally Ana was embarrassed by her politically incorrect questioning so to be fair as the parents looked on she asked a little white boy, "Is your name Shawntel?", all the while knowing full well it wasn't, but just then strolls in a little black boy and his family and Ana said , "Hi, whats your name?" and the child replied, "I'm Shawntel!"
*Poor awkward Ana, it's a reasonable mistake and to be fair I've heard of some pretty strange Catholic names before.
8 comments:
I think Cunegunda has to be the weirdest Catholic name of all!
I went to school with a Stacy and and a Stacey. Stacy was 6 feet tall with a booming, deep voice. Stacey was 4'11" and still wore clothes from the kids department at 17.
We had a substitute teacher for gym class one day who too attendance. When 6' Stacy's name was called and he boomed "HERE" the teacher told him his name was not Stacy. We all told the teacher that yes, he WAS Stacy. The teacher refused to believe it. Stacy ended up storming out of the classroom. I don't blame him one bit.
At least your daughter tried to smooth things over! I give her a lot of credit for that!
There used to be a Sister Cunegunda here. She was from Germany, a Benedictine; and was quite a legend among the kids who had her for Saturday catechism.
I had a Sister Columba, and a Sister Mary Florentia among my teachers. Also knew a Sister Polycarpa. No wonder a lot of the sisters went to using their Baptismal names!
http://i45.tinypic.com/jg48qu.png
Thank you Vincenzo!
Hubby's great aunt was a Benedictine, Sr. Aquinas. Which I think was cool, but the Protestant side of the family could never prounounce very well.
Stacy is short for Anastaz. How hard is that? There was a Father Stacy at one of the Orthodox churches but he's in NJ now.
I have a relative named "Brandy"; who wants to be named after a liquor?
And I've heard of similar strange names...there is a wisdom in naming children with saints' names and also with conventional names...the poor things have to go to school and be in public, after all.
I think it's a kind of "child abuse" to name a child something that will be forever a source of ridicule and eye-brow raising...just sayin':<)!
NP - you got that right! Even though my first name was very common in my school my last name was a mouthful that nobody could pronounce or spell. I swear I am still scarred by that. Then I married a man with an equally uncommon last name. Sometimes I wish his last name had been Smith or Jones. Kids DO NOT like being singled out for weird names and having to constantly spell them.
At least my mom didn't call me Pina (went to school with 2 Italian girls named that -you don't even want to know the nicknames....)
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