Writer's Block: Repeat After Me...last one for today, I promise.
How have people pronounced your name? How is it supposed to sound?
This surname is Altschul. It consists of two German words...Alt, meaning "old" and Schule (without the 'e'), meaning "school". My last name literally means "old school", which I think is awesome.
Now, it normally doesn't get said a lot because plenty of people can't be bothered with it. You can see them struggling with it in their heads and they just kind of give up. I think it's both really funny, and kind of irritating...I mean, geez. My father sometimes orders or books things under the name "Smith" because it usually takes too long for people to grapple with the name. I consider just using the first half of my first name...Kind of like Cher...
It gets misspelled a lot. Like a lot. I think I've only seen it spelled correctly a handful of times...Besides being spelled by people in my family, of course. Any way, I've had "Altschol", "Alshort" (what the fuck??), "Alshull" (no banana), "Altshul" (most common), and my personal favourite "Oltshul"...It just looks weird. On over half of the official documents I have bearing my name, my surname is misspelled.
So, it's Altschul. Pronounced with a hard 'a', rather than the soft 'a' you'd use when mentioning the "alt" key on your keyboard, and the second part is pronounced "shool", which rhymes with "pull". Easy when you know how, lol. Altschul. Kind of funny looking after I've typed it out more times than I think I ever have before. Eight letters...Like my first and middle names have eight letters together. Kind of a nice balance.
Small B-side, all of the Altschuls in the phone book are related to me, so it's kind of nice to be able to go through it and actually know who the other (like, eight) people with my last name are.