For the entirety of my life, no matter where I go, no matter what I do.. from Seattle to Los Angeles, from Newport to Indianapolis.. Since I was old enough to write my own name, up to 3 times this very week.. it happens.
Whenever I have to tell somebody my name.. and they write it down (normally this is in the service industry I guess.. banks, fast food, anywhere that they write out an invoice) they figure out some provocatively new way to spell it.
Nobody ever misspells their names, they only misspell mine.
I wouldn't be put off by this so much if my name was jehosiphat, or zecharia, or else if there were an overwhelming number of Jesse's with their names spelled in these different ways instead of the canonical J-E-S-S-E.
I, however, have always believed that this spelling is the most prevalent spelling. By a magnitude or so in fact. I so infrequently meet other Jesse's, so I've never been able to put my theory to the test.. until now.
I realized I can ask Google how to spell my name. :) I use it to check the spelling of other sundry words.. including and espescially well known but hard to spell names.. surely it will know what is the most popular spelling, and to what degree. So, I just searched for each variant and interpreted the "number of pages found" value as an authorative example of how prevalan each spelling is. Here are the results:
| Jesse: | 4,800,000 |
|---|---|
| Jessie: | 1,750,000 |
| Jesi: | 376,000 |
| Jessy: | 264,000 |
| Jessi: | 256,000 |
| Jessee: | 74,700 |
This seems to correlate precicely with how common I feel each of these spellings are. Now, if you modify "Jesse" to have a value of 100,000 instead of 4.8 million, then that shows you how frequently my name gets (mis)-spelled by the common person. EG, the only misspelling that happens less frequently than a correct spelling is jessee, which is of course just silly. :)
In other news, it is entirely appropriate to shorten my name to "Jess" in informal situations (not much shorter to write, but half the syllables) and Google gives that spelling 1.5 million hits, more than any of the misspellings except for the all too virulent "Jessie".
I suppose it doesn't help to have a name also used by some number of girls in various spellings, and even less popular than it's feminine form "Jessica" (8.4 million hits on Google).. but my name was here first gol darn it, go get your own name(s). :)
Posted by jesse at September 21, 2004 11:51 AM