Hell Ain’t A - or what’s in a name
Stand well back - I’m about to make an announcement. It’s not much of an announcement and will mean absolutely nothing to you if past experience’s are anything to go by but it means a lot to me.
It’s quite a simple admission. There’s not much to it. It’s simply this. I have a name. I know that most people do and I’m not boasting or anything but when you’ve finished reading this I’d like you to spread the word around - tell everyone you know and maybe my blood pressure will stabilise, I won’t be as fucking furious as I am right now and my chances of being locked in the coalshed until I calm down will diminish.
I was very lucky. Confused as they were about most things to do with bringing up children, (actually confused as they were about most things point) - my parents carefully considered a various selection of names before settling on one that could be repeated in polite society. Lauren was an early contender as was Roxanne (until they realised that had Sting ruined a perfectly good name forever) Rowan was dismissed as being too hippy twee and Moonblossom was dismissed as sounding too much like a cheap hand cream. Maggie-May was a serious contender for the first few days - as it incorporated one of mums favourite songs and also the names of a grandma and a great -aunt but in the end it was decided against ( possibly on the grounds that having inherited my families vanity, I would be tormented enough by the morning sun in my face showing my age without having the fact immortalised by Rod Stewarts gravely tones) .
I could have lived with any of those names. All are sufficiently unusual without being of the obviously made up variety and all have sufficient gravitas to grow old with (with the obvious exception of Moonblossom - although I would have been quite happy with that too once I’d read up on Native American folklore and started wearing a lot of turquoise). Most also have a little bit of street cred so that they wouldn’t date - (except Moonblossom but I could have lived with that as opposed to being called something like.. oh bugger I can’t think of a name without running the risk of offending someone reading this!.) Luckily my parents didn’t have any pretensions to be upper-middle class bohemians so I escaped an attack of the Hannah’s, Belinda’s, Poppy’s or any other name that sounds like it should belong to a rag doll.
Instead they went with tradition. After all if you want to be unconventional then being traditional is much the best way. Knowing that my Latvian grandfather had not seen his mother since he was imprisoned by the Germans at fourteen and knowing that owing to the Cold War he would never see her again they decided to call me after his mother. So I was named for her and luckily she had a pretty name.
Now I will admit that I hard time growing into this name. It’s not funky. It’s not groovy. It’s an elegant name that you can’t really make a diminutive of (well you can but you really need to know Latvian and apart from grandpa and his friend Molotov (now there’s a nickname) there weren’t that many Latvians in a small North East village.) and as a teenager I longed to be an Angie or a Jools or a Roxy or any one of a number of hip and trendy short names that would see me firmly ensconced in the world of cool. But like a Chanel suit or a pair of really well fitting jeans my name is something that I’ve grown into. I can wear it anywhere, I can dress it up or dress it down - it always looks good and it’ll last me a lifetime. It’s not a name that will become threadbare. It can be screamed across a soundcheck, whispered in the heat of passion (it sounds very good said with a husky French accent but then most things do), it sums up effortless efficiency in a business meeting, it’s exotic enough for the arts and formal enough for finance. It also looks good up in lights. With this name I can be villain, martyr, saviour or floozy. It will take any honorific from Empress to Auntie. It will one day be perfect as Granny ****** - conjuring up ebony canes and/or being spoilt rotten. It is perfectly balanced by my surname and rolls off the tongue with drama and passion. It looks really good signed with a flourish. It suits me (or I suit it). It goes great with F’s name and surname too (don’t mock - all women check out what their name would sound like with their guys surname) And, as I get older and realise the importance of family and roots and tradition and heritage it makes me proud to know that my having this name keeps alive a branch of the family that was nearly destroyed by the war, that I am named for a women who suffered in a way no mother should ever suffer, that my having this name means that what my grandfather went through has not been forgot and that maybe it made him happy to know that with my birth the life that was imposed upon him and the life he was forced to leave behind were joined together in a new start.
But there seems to be a problem with my name that people can’t get over. I don’t understand it but there you go. Very few people pronounce it correctly. Now I can understand this should people first see it written down. It is confusing to English speaking people who will automatically anglicise it and pronounce it as it’s spelt. However what I can’t comprehend is the fact that people continue to mispronounce it even after I’ve pointed out the correct pronunciation. I can’t work out whether this is because they are all profoundly deaf and so never heard me, whether it is because their opinion of me is so low that they really couldn’t care what my name is anyway, whether their arrogance is such that they feel it’s OK to depersonalise me by removing my name from me (although if that’s the case why not just give me a number), whether they are so convinced of their own infallibility and intellect that they refuse to comprehend or admit that they may have got something wrong, whether they are attempting to assert their own place in the pecking order by asserting their own superiority (after all slaves and servants were often renamed by their masters) or whether they are just plain rude.
Now I will admit that I am partly to blame for this state of affairs. I have not always been as assiduous as I could have been in insisting on the correct pronunciation of my name. Truth to tell until the past week this name thing was a minor irritation which bugged me but really didn’t make that much difference to my life. If people chose to be ignorant then that was their problem. 90% of the time I would never see them again and of the remaining 10% at some point they would be in the company of someone who did pronounce my name correctly, realise their error and change their pronunciation. The matter would then be closed with the minimum of embarrassment to all concerned. I pride myself (rightly or wrongly) on having good manners, I intensely dislike making people feel uncomfortable by pointing out any faux pas they may have made and so for a long time I laboured under the delusion that, that as long as I wasn’t actually being called something uncomplimentary it didn’t really matter how my name was pronounced. To be honest correcting people had taken on the same weary air as the intro to that David Bowie song about Andy Warhol. So I apologise to those of you who may feel that I am now being unreasonably harsh when you had no prior knowledge that this was something that was upsetting and annoying to me.
But, after spending at least an hour a day on the phone for the last month to the tossers who work at Norwich Union Insurance in a vain attempt to get our car (broken into, passenger door hanging off and steering wheel and ignition -wait for it technical term here - fucked) taken to a garage before someone came back to finish what they started I’m a little ragged round the edges. And, after speaking to possibly the entire workforce of that useless and pathetic company none of whom were able to pronounce my name even after I had said it, spelt it and reminded them of it, I have decided to draw a line in the sand.
So here’s the deal. My name is Helena. It is pronounced Hel-ain-a. Try saying “hell ain’t a” and then miss out the T and you got it. Extra points if you can finish the title of the track and name the band. It is not Helen. It is not Eleanor, Elaine, Hannah or even, God help me Linda ( don’t look so amazed it happens more often than you think) It is definitely, absolutely and emphatically not Helen’a (Other than having waist length hair, pale skin and tiny waist in no way do I resemble a third rate actress in a bad adaptation of an E M Forster novel). It is pronounced Hel-ain-a.
I will forgive those of you with a Geordie accent for pronouncing it “Hel-ee-nah” because that particular pronunciation brings back memories of my childhood and the friends of my great-grandparents who spoke proper Geordie dialect. I will forgive those people who do not speak English as a first language for various softening of the vowels and consonants because they at least attempt a correct pronunciation and I will forgive the wonderful Jordanian boss of my first “proper” job for consistently spelling it “Hellenah” which is quite sexy in an Arabian Nights sort of way (although he always pronounced it correctly).
Whatever you may think of my intellect it is insulting to suggest that I am so stupid that I don’t know how to pronounce my name. My parents have many faults but brainlessness is really not one of them and so it is insulting to them to suggest that they got the pronunciation of their child’s name wrong. My grandfather did not get the pronunciation of his granddaughters name wrong and it is a profound insult to him and what he went through to suggest that you know better than he did how to pronounce his mothers name. My great-grandmother may not have spoken English but I’m pretty sure that she knew how to pronounce her own name.
My name is Helena - it is pronounced Hel-ain-a. It is not pronounced Hel-en, Ell-an-or, E-lay-ne, Han-nah, Lin-da or any other variations thereof. It is definitely absolutely and emphatically not pronounced Helen-a. I apologise for repeating the obvious but it appears that all the silent (and invisible) Z’s, X’s Q’s, the absence of vowels and the surfeit of consonants make it impossible for anybody to say.
Therefore if you ask me what my name is, please do not assume that I have mispronounced it and repeat Helen’a, Elaine, Eleanor, Hannah or Linda. If, when asking me my name over the phone I say Hel-ain-a and there is a silence while you figure out how to spell it and I say H-E-L-E-N-A please do not think that I have mispronounced it and start calling me Helen’a. After I have corrected your pronunciation three times I will give up and although I try very hard not to automatically suppose that anyone who works in a call centre has had their brain removed, my prejudice (intolerant, arrogant and judgmental as it may be) will be reinforced by your inability to master the repetition of a word that a Mynah bird would have no trouble with.