French kids don’t get middle names.
We either get a double first name, or no middle name at all. My father comes from France. For better or worse, my mother is a devout, Hungarian catholic so she insisted upon one.
Neither could compromise so I got slapped with both.
A double first name and a middle one. Cyrilla-Gabrielle Franziska. But ‘Franziska’with the Hungarian ‘s’ so pronounced ‘Franzishka’. A French-Uralic combo that pretty much set me up for all order of errors in every setting imaginable.
Cyrilla was my parent’s attempt at feminizing the men’s name Cyril, after my mom’s uncle.
And Gabrielle? My dad just liked it.
One of the most common French girl’s names. And because, with the exception of Cyrilla, Gabrielle and Franziska are both common names in their home countries, neither figured there would be any difficulty in the general public saying or spelling my name.
Joke’s on them as they quickly discovered, upon entering their kid into the American public education system.
A Name Too Big for One Country
My classmates quickly turned Cyrilla into “cereal” and, mortified, I dropped it immediately and largely went by Gabrielle. But that was really no better.
Nearly everyone is surprised when I bring this up. But I promise, no matter how many times I’ve tried to explain it, people still get it wrong six ways to Sunday.
I could quite literally sound it out for someone, syllable by syllable only for said someone to parrot it back still wildly off-base and incorrect. And even if someone did manage to get it right, it was quickly met with an eyeroll and a sarcastic, ‘well, Gabrielle is too long anyway so I’m just going to call you Gabby anyway’ like it was a cheeky little joke.
I never found it amusing, only irritating.
When Your Name Becomes a Joke
Once, on a climbing trip to Kentucky with my boyfriend at the time, I introduced myself to another climber we met at the base of the crag we were at that day. The interaction went something like this:
“Hi, my name is Gabrielle, nice to meet you!”
Him: “Well nice to meet you too, Gabriel.”
Oh boy, here we go.
“Now Gabriel, when you get to this draw…”
Not it.
“And then, Gaybriella, when you make that move up there…”
Still not it.
“Then, Gay-bree-elle at the end of the route…”
Also not it.
By the end of our conversation homeslice had somehow managed to encompass every way name had been mispronounced over the course of my entire life up to that point in one fifteen minute interaction.
To be honest, I was kind of impressed.
It takes commitment to get someone’s name wrong that consistently when it was said clearly at the beginning of our conversation.
But by then, I was drained.
No one could get my first name right, no one could get my last name right either. I may as well have not had a name at all and hated being called Gabby with the passion of a thousand suns. It positively drove me up a wall and it all came to a head during my freshman year of college.
Back when I competed for USA Climbing, an official accidentally misspelled my name when entering my results into USA Climbing’s scoring system despite my writing it out in perfect, capital letters on my scorecard for exactly this reason. And trust me, my handwriting is pretty impeccable.
It was on paper, letter by letter, and again, someone still got it wrong. This resulted in my accidentally having two competitor profiles in USAC’s system and almost being DQ’d from moving on to the next round of competition.
I was livid.
I didn’t want to merely flip a table, I wanted to throw it out the window altogether. I’d had enough. It was time to pick an “American” name.
Becoming Phoebe
So I started shopping around.
And believe me, I shopped. I tried out different names at Starbucks, in conversations with strangers on trains, on those mindless, marketing emails that unsubscribe from as soon as the first one shows up in your inbox.
And eventually, I picked one: Phoebe.
P-h-o-e-b-e. Technically Greek, not American. Two syllables, pronounced nothing like the way it’s spelled. But simple, straightforward. Everyone knew how to say it. And with the exception of the occasional inversion of the ‘oe’ in the middle, everyone seemed to know how to spell it too.
So it was settled. I became Phoebe. And I’d be lying if I said my problems weren’t solved instantly. Because they were.
All of a sudden, everyone could say my name right. No one questioned it. Some of my friends even started using the cute nicknames associated with it.
Everything got easier.
I didn’t have to spell my name a thousand times or deal with people botching it by accident or on purpose because it was “too long”. I didn’t want to shove scissors in my ears every time someone shouted for me from across the climbing gym. Or when a professor would call roll in front of the class. I was in the clear, thank gosh, right?
Not really.
When I broke it to my parents, they were livid.
I wasn’t even changing it legally, just socially. But my dad, especially, was furious. The French take naming their kids pretty seriously as most Europeans do and modifying any part of it or changing it altogether, is seen as an outright rejection of your culture and your family altogether. And my dad, being the most militant French nationalist I have ever met in my life, of course saw it in exactly that way and refused to acknowledge the use of my American name.
I felt bad, for sure, but this was just easier. For everyone but especially me. He couldn’t see my point of view and didn’t want to. So we left the topic alone altogether and shoved it under the proverbial rug.
But that didn’t mean it wasn’t still a tripping hazard.
Years went by where I went by Phoebe.
And as those years passed, so developed a mild annoyance over having to use it, and a pang of sadness and guilt over–you guessed it–rejecting where my parents came from had started to develop. Because my brother and I were raised with a heavy dose of all things French and Hungarian growing up, we were still deeply connected to my parent’s home countries.
My dad came to the U.S. because he just “felt like it”. The guy is adventurous. My mom’s family however, left Hungary because the political conditions in the country necessitated it. I don’t think they ever really wanted to leave, and only a few of my mom’s siblings assimilated into the U.S. She and my grandparents never really did.
They brought Hungary to the U.S. with them and my brother and I were total Third Culture Kids. And while he has mostly rejected it and Americanized, I’ve held onto it hard.
The disconnect between something that I held onto and valued so hard and the swap in my identity from taking an “American” name was beginning to grow into a not-so-great feeling. Mostly one of the resentfulness and annoyance that, yet again, I could coach someone through how to say Cyrilla-Gabrielle and it’d still get ruined or boiled down to Gabby.
I started to hate Phoebe because it started to become a reminder of what couldn’t be, but I knew, at that point, I was in too deep, tons of people knew as Phoebe, there was no going back. I figured it was a necessary evil and I’d just have to bite it and deal with it.
Hearing My Name Again
Until 2022 rolled around. And I found myself in Switzerland training for my first ever ice climbing Continental Cup circuit. I noticed it the moment I handed over my passport at customs in Zurich.
“What is your business here, Cyrilla-Gabrielle?”
She rattled it off with effortless accuracy. The first time in years I’d heard my full name said aloud by someone other than my parents. I remember breaking into a giant grin but not wanting to hold up the line, so I said nothing and moved along to baggage claim.
And then it hit me.
I was finally on a continent where everyone could likely say my name correctly. Turns out, I was right. The whole month that I was traveling around Europe for my competitions, I introduced myself as Gabrielle and no one thought twice about it. I could have taken off like a rocket I was so excited.
With each subsequent visit to the EU that came after, with every competition I attended, the more normal it finally felt to use my name again.
To sum up ‘Mt. What’s Your Point?’ names are an incredibly important part of one’s identity personally and ethnically.
And Americans are really good at botching ethnic names. The pressure to just “make it easier” for the people around us, is draining and frustrating. It hacks off a significant chunk of one’s culture and, in my case, left me torn between two worlds.
The desire to fit in, in the country I grew up in but also remain tied to the ones my parents came from. And it’s easy not to understand if you don’t come from that background.
The issue doesn’t lie within “difficult” names.
In my experience, it 100% lied with people’s unwillingness to learn how to say it right or listen to me when I explained it to them. Some though, want to learn how to say these names correctly but might be intimidated or just don’t know where to start.
There’s always the concept of ‘google is free’, in this context meaning, you could probably huck ‘how to pronounce [fill-in-the-blank name]’into the search bar and get a result. But even then, sometimes even google is wrong.
Which is why I will always advise defaulting to just asking outright so you can hear it from the mouth of the person themselves.
It is such a small big thing, and takes far less time than people think. Not everyone is good with languages, sure. But intentional dismissal with absolutely zero effort? Rude. And more often than not, incredibly racist when it comes to non-Western names.
Teachers and professors especially, when presented with their roster of students, can start by reaching out to the parents or the student themselves, and asking how to properly say their name.
Consistency is the next step.
Showing up for said student by continually working towards saying their name correctly, and then encouraging those around them to do the same, is just as valuable as the taking initiative itself. Along with putting a stop to bullying of their students because of their name by their peers. I got bullied all the time for my last name.
My classmates clowned it as often as they could and it was a giant, contributing factor to why I hated my name so much growing up.
Bosses, managers, and employers can do the same thing.
Ask your new hire how to properly say their name and insist that your team do the same and respect it. Go another step further and maybe even ask them where their name comes from, or how they got it.
A little effort goes a really long way and there’s something really special about showing curiosity about someone’s inner world and where they come from. The outcome–learning something new and making that person feel seen–is always a net positive.
I’ll close with this: I have since moved full-time to Switzerland.
I haven’t used ‘Phoebe’ in years. I don’t have to anymore. I have a Dutch best friend who calls my Cyri short for Cyrilla and I love it. This will be the first ever article I will have published under my real, full-name. This past Christmas, I received a locket with both my grandfathers’ photos inside. And my initials on the front.
The real ones, ‘CGT’ etched into gold until the end of time. Or until I lose the locket. Whichever one comes first.
French kids don’t get middle names. But this one sure did. And I couldn’t love it more.
