The Mind Provoked to Dance

“712 More Things to Write About” by the San Francisco Writer’s Grotto provides 712 creative writing prompts to “provoke the mind to dance”.  It was on my Christmas List to Santa and he was kind enough to leave it under the Christmas tree.

 Unlike the Bible it's acceptable to just turn to any page to see what the prompt is.

My first entry:-

“People Who Mispronounce My Name”

Two people come to mind when it comes to mispronouncing my name. The first person was Kay Grant, or Kay Carver, if we are going by married names, although she was Kay Grant when she did it.  She used to call me Menanlie instead of Melanie.

My best friend and I, in our school days, went through a phase of speaking backwards.  She was Thiduj and I was Einalem for a while.

There are a lot of people that pronounce “Mel” correctly but wrongly assume that it is short for “Melissa”, but that technically doesn’t count as mispronouncing it.

You know of course, as I keep telling people, that it means “dark and mysterious.”  The dark bit is related to the Greek word for “ink”.  The mysterious bit I just add for dramatic effect.  It is a real battle not to live up to my name.  It is hard to be an open book.

The second person to mispronounce my name was me.  Not my first name, obviously.  There were no cute baby-getting-it-wrong moments when it came to me saying my name or the names of brothers and sisters, of which I had more than a few.

It is my married surname that I stumble over. Too often I say “Kerr” to rhyme with “fur” or “spur” or “occur” when it should be “Kerr” to rhyme with “share” and “spare” and “don’t-you-dare”.

I suppose those times when I am giving myself a firm telling off by using my full married name – Melanie Kerr (rhyming it with fur, spur and occur) I could ignore myself on principle.