what's in a name?

naming a baby is hard.

we knew that osa would be our middle name for a girl forever. we both adored it, it was adam's grandmother's name, and the fact that it means "girl bear" in spanish is too damn cute.

alexandra came to us out of nowhere at the 20 week ultrasound when we found out we were having a girl. we looked it up and it means "defender of humanity." beautiful. the two together worked--they had a nice cadence when said aloud and honestly, if you're going to defend humanity today, you've gotta be a bit of a bear.

we thought this through. or, we thought we did, but we didn't take into account the lovely brooklyn and long island accents that are pervasive in our neck of the woods.

for some reason, folks here CANNOT say alexandra. it becomes some mess that sounds like alexander, but with an "a" and a "rer" sound at the end. like "alexandraer." it bugs the crap out of me.

i heart brooklyn. i truly do. why else would i continue to be shoved into an apartment that resembles a clown car if i wasn't happy here? but this mispronciation of such a simple name is driving me looney.

it seems that the linguistic rule here is that words that end in "a" = "er"; words that end in "er" = "a". here are some examples:

jupiter = ju-pi-tah
mirror = mire-rah
lisa = lise-er
alexandra = al-lex-an-drer
idea = i-dee-er

with a last name like mine (ungemah), i honestly tried to find a name that was impossible to screw up. obviously, my efforts were futile!