It happened again. I was making an appointment this morning and the person taking it had trouble spelling my name. This has happened all of my adult life. You would think that the name "Beverly" would be an easy one to recognize. There are places named Beverly (Beverly Hills, Beverly, MA), there are famous people named Beverly (Beverly Sills, Beverly Cleary, Beverly D'Angelo, well maybe not her), there's even a St. John of Beverly. The name Beverly has distinguished origins. It originated as a place name meaning "Beaver Stream". Well, I think that's distinguished anyway.
Distinguished as it may be, I experience it being mispronounced all of the time. Beberly, Everly, Beverid, Beamerly. This becomes doubly cutting when it's coupled with my first name being spelled wrong, i.e. Ron, Bob, Rod, Rahm.
I also have my name transposed. The worst and most embarrassing time this occurred was during roll call in my first day of high school typing class, when the instructor addressed me as "Beverly Roberts". She seem disappointed when I turned out to be a male.
To be fair, there are a number of alternative spellings to my last name, including Beverlea, Beverleigh, Beverlie, Beverley, Baverley, Beaverley, Beverlie ... shit even Peverall and Peveril.
But still, this has to be a common enough name for people to get it right. For help, I went to the U.S. Census bureau Genealogy site to find out. And I learned ... that the name Beverly has a 0.006% frequency rate in the population of the United States and is ranked 2,279.
Hmm ... Maybe I'll just change my name to Ron Beberly.
P.S. You can find your name ranking here.
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