Names are an important aspect of our identity and sense of self. For those of us from minority communities, names may be particular, in some way, to our linguistic and cultural heritage, and thus may be at odds with their counterpart names from the dominant cultures within which we reside. The resultant tensions which ensue with regards to pronunciation and transcription can have a profound effect on the bearer of the minority name, inducing feelings
of anger, disappointment, embarrassment, shame and despair. Mispronunciation can also occur at random, even within our own linguistic cultural context, and thus can be just plain annoying. In this autoethnographic article I draw on examples from my own biography to explore this phenomenon throughout my lifecourse.