(posted Wednesday, February 18, 2009)
I once knew a boy named Sue. He was an Asian kid who went to my high school. His actual name was Soo, but I'm proceeding phonetically here.
There were a lot of funny names in my school. Many of the students were immigrants or children of immigrants, whose names consisted of odd combinations of consonents and vowels, strung together in ways that the Anglo-Saxon mind had trouble deciphering. I don't have a copy of my high school yearbook but, if memory serves, the roster of students' names would have baffled a Harvard linguist. I doubt if William Safire could pronounce half of the names correctly.
My name, Milo Samardzija, was near the top of the list of tongue-twisting appellations. It wasn't the worst, by any means, but it was close. There was only one teacher that ever got my name right on the first try and that was because she was descended from the same part of the Balkans that my family escaped from. The rest of the school's staff mangled my name for weeks or months before getting it right. One old fart, a drunkard who to tried to teach English, never got it right. He eventually gave up, resorting to saying Hey you or pointing at me when my participation was required.
It was during high school that I grew to hate my name. I envied people with names like Smith, Jones, or Johnson. Wouldn't it be great, I thought, to have a name with only one or two syllables? I had a distant relative in Milwaukee who changed his name from Rade Samardzija to Rudy Summers. I remember asking my dad if he had ever considered changing or shortening our last name. He looked at me like I was crazy and said, "That's a stupid fucking question if I ever heard one."
As bad as I felt about my own name, I felt almost as bad for other students who had unpronounceable or awkward names, like Aphrodite Baffalukis, Predrag Bielopetrovich, Shlomo Finklestein, Scotty Queerman, and George Shitz. We were brothers and sisters united in humiliation, fellow travelers on the road to ridicule. How we got out of high school with our sanity and self-esteem intact is beyond me. In my case, I don't think I did.
Things only got worse when I was drafted into the US Army. If educated high school teachers couldn't pronounce my name then what could I expect from barely literate drill instructors? But, again, I wasn't alone. There were plenty of others in my basic training company with terrible names. I remember one guy in particular, an Armenian, with a name so complicated that it took the combined efforts of two sergeants and a Second Lieutenant to just come close to pronouncing it. In the end, they resorted to calling him Alphabet. The poor kid was so traumatized that he eventually deserted, defecting, I believe, to Huimanguillo, Mexico, Ikaluktutiak, Canada, or somewhere in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
I caught a huge break a couple of years ago when the Chicago Cubs drafted a young pitcher out of Notre Dame named Jeff Samardzija. When he made it to the big leagues last year and radio and TV announcers began broadcasting his name, it changed my life. Suddenly, people began pronuncing my name correctly - on the first try. I was no longer a Hey You, Alphabet, Whatchamacallit, or That Guy. I was a somebody, with a real name, a name that, at least on the North Side, was not so strange after all. It was a life-changing experience, liberating me from the purgatory of the bad-name-afflicted. I hope Jeff Samardzija has a long and successful career with the Cubs and never does anything to dishonor the noble name of Samardzija. After all, if someone with the fine, upstanding name like Bartman can be brought down, it can happen to anybody.
One thing about having an odd name is that it made me appreciate other odd names. In fact, I've become a connoiseur of awkward appellations. I've even compiled a short list of some of my favorite names, in various categories, that I take pleasure in hearing and saying. I'd like to share them with you.
- Politics: Dick Devine
- Football: Terdell Middleton
- Baseball: Pete LaCock
- Exotic Dancing: Ineeda Mann
- Statesmen: Zbigniew Bzrezinski
- Rock 'n' Roll (tie): Howard Futterman and the Amish Playboys and Skid Marx and the Excrementals
If you, faithful readers, have any favorite odd names, feel free to suggest them in the comment section of this blog. We just might post them someday.
