“What kind of retarded parent would give a kid a name like Sharmeka?”
...a teacher I know decided to teach inner city kids because the state offers to pay down your college loans if you do. She called off the names in her new class but said, “I can’t pronounce this one. Would S-H-I-T-H-E-A-D please stand up?” Kid says, “That be me. Shi-thead”. True story.
Here’s another one: I worked for a law firm in D.C. where one of the administrative assistants’ last name was Blank. First name: Felinda. No joke.
...a teacher I know decided to teach inner city kids because the state offers to pay down your college loans if you do. She called off the names in her new class but said, “I can’t pronounce this one. Would S-H-I-T-H-E-A-D please stand up?” Kid says, “That be me. Shi-thead”. True story.Odd. A teacher friend in MI told me the same story. It was pronounced SHI THAY' ED Maybe it is apocryphal?
G.G. Jackson was one of many women employed by agencies of the federal government. She had been born in Chicago's South Side in 1963. Her mother, Shavonna Jackson, had been fifteen at the time. Like many 15-year-old single mothers, Shavonna Jackson had not thought much about the realities of motherhood, including the immediate problem of what to name her offspring.
Concurrently, overworked interns on rotation in ghetto hospitals did what they could to entertain themselves amid 20-hour days in depressing surroundings. In 1963, as in all other years, one of the standard gambits among interns assigned to inner-city delivery rooms was to see who could cause the most outrageous name to be printed on the birth certificate of children born to ghetto teenagers.
The second week of February, 1963 saw some serious competition among interns in south Chicago. In a five-day period, there were Chicago-area births registered for Madison Avenue Washington, Epluribus Wilson, Nosmo King (inspired by a waiting room sign), Simian Cook, and Anus Brown. The award that week, however, went to a young doctor from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, who hated working in the Chicago facility. He had suggested to Miss Jackson that she give her infant daughter a distinctive, happy-sounding name, and offered one he thought appropriate. He pronounced the first name with the accent on the second syllable, and Shavonna thought it sounded nice. Like 'Gloria', only fancier. People who read the name would pronounce it differently, but Shavonna could not read, so the impact of the intern's joke was not felt for some time.
[G.G. Jackson's name is not revealed until hundreds of pages later...]
Take a lot of patient information and talk with insurance carriers over the phone. Get so tired of saying, “Spell please”. New spelling of Andy I learned is Ayndeeye. At least people manning call centers in India have good sense to say their name is “Bill” or “Susan”. Even though you know it’s not their given name, at least they they make an effort to appear American.
This is no joke. I am in law enforcement and these are two names I ran across. Vernilla Fudge and Jawanna Dye.