names

[David Bergdahl]

A former colleague of mine named Lorraine Galli married Armand
Desruisseaux (pronounced the same as deRusso) which they used for
restaurant reservations. . . but even that got garbled so they switched to
Brooks [Fr. ruisseaux = gutters].  Armand grew up French-speaking in
Manchester, NH.  The best part of his last name was not the
mispronunciations, but the misspelling on mass-mailings!  Since my name
suffers the same tendency to be misspelled (people want to put the {g}
and the {h} together, confusing {burgh} with {berg}, I've always attended
to creative misspellings of other people's names. Perhaps that's a tangent
we can go on next. . .

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David Bergdahl          Ellis Hall 366         Ohio University / Athens
Associate Prof/English  tel:  (740) 593-2783   fax:  (740) 593-2818
                        bergdahl at oak.cats.ohiou.edu
                    http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~bergdahl
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