I have a complicated relationship with my last name. I’ve wrestled with the difficulties it presents my whole life. No one can pronounce it. No one can spell it. It gets filed in different formats and listed or found differently in electronic databases depending on how people record it there. I know I shouldn’t be so sensitive about any of these things, but they have consequences both psychological and material. Let’s start with the pronunciation. It’s de-SOM-bree. When I was little people teased me by calling me cheese, because I’d correct the more frequent “bray” “ber” or “bra” forms of my last syllable by responding “bree” (which sounds like “brie,” and led, hence, the oddly prophetic cheese nickname). I should be used to it by now, since the incorrect pronunciations far outweigh the correct ones. But your name, pronounced incorrectly, doesn’t sound like your name. If Amanda gets called Amindi or Fred gets called Frod it wouldn’t feel right. Then there’s the spelling. Two capital letters, no space, in one name is unusual, I’ll grant you. And, again, when people get it wrong – the most common versions are de Sombre or Desombre – it doesn’t feel like my name. It’s the space, though, that screws things up. Because if there’s a space there, people don’t know how to alphabetize it (whenever I go to a Will Call window and the person can’t find my tickets, I suggest looking under “S,” which is often where it has been filed by someone who saw the Sombre and not the piece before the incorrect space that someone inserted). Interestingly, the U.S. government has decided that the official way to deal with two capital letters in a database that uses all caps is to put a space there. So on my passport I’m DE SOMBRE, and I’m certain that I’ll run into troubles as the security theatre gets worse and someone recognizes that my passport doesn’t match my birth certificate or drivers license (both of which were able to cope with two capitals). Where the mistakes other people make with my name hurt my professional life is when the number of times my name appears needs to be counted for some reason. It happens in both my careers. In my academic life, citation counts – the number of times people reference articles I’ve written – matter for my professional reputation and for some actual measurements. And while I can often – although not always – persuade the actual journals to publish my name correctly, that doesn’t ensure that people will cite it correctly. And some of the citation indexes don’t record it as my name when there’s a space, and no one will find it when there’s some other incorrect spelling. What’s making me think of this issue now, and blog about it on my music blog, is that my new CD has just been sent out to the folk radio DJs, who are starting to play it and post on their playlists what they played. There are – amazingly enough – even charts for the folk world, and so accurately recording the number of times specific songs or the whole CD has been played matters. None of these things matter all that much, really. My academic reputation is strong, and I’m happy to have found an academic job where citation counts don’t rule evaluation. And while I’m extremely glad to be getting some good airplay on folk radio, I know that this CD isn’t going to top (or probably even make) the charts no matter what. But the fact that these are frustrations I’ve dealt with my whole life makes them just a little more exhausting. On the other hand, there’s something fantastic about having an unusual name. Anyone who wants to go looking for me can find me (I don’t get email messages asking “are you by any chance the Beth Jones I went to high school with?). It wasn’t hard to register my domain name. My name is rare enough that I can trace family lineage with almost every DeSombre I’ve ever heard of in this country. And it does serve as a good test for how well someone knows me – you’re pretty much only going to get my name right if I’ve told you how to pronounce it (or you’ve paid close attention to the bio on my webpage). And when you do, I’ll know you actually know me, and I’ll truly appreciate your effort. I guess there are multiple times in my life when I could have changed it (and several reasons it might have made sense), but it never occurred to me to do that. After all, if it doesn’t really feel like my name when someone mispronounces it, it would feel even less like my name if it were an entirely new one.