What's In A Name?

GOT A HARD-TO-PRONOUNCE MONIKER? COME SIT WITH CAITLIN MACY, WHO SPENT YEARS LEARNING TO LOVE HERS.

- Caitlin Macy

YOU ARE PROBABLY under the impression that you are reading an essay by Caitlin Macy. You’re only half right. My name is not pronounced the way it is spelled. Macy is pronounced Macy—like the store—but my first name is not pronounced KATE-lin, as you would expect, but KAISH-lin, as if the “t” were a “sh.”

I was born in 1970. (Often that fact seems like explanation enough for a quirky name.) My mother, Claire—whose own mother had to juggle four children and the relentless housework demands of the 1940s—wanted her children to feel special. She had named my older sister Jeremy. That’s right: my older sister. Of the many ironies that accompanied her decision to call me KAISH-lin, for me one of the most enduring is that the name Caitlin pronounced the normal way was unusual at the time. During my childhood, you could not find “Caitlin” on a mug or a key chain or a pencil set. Of course, by the ’90s, the name was everywhere, in various forms: Caitlin, Kaitlyn, Katelyn. But even in 1970, KATE-lin didn’t satisfy my mother’s yen for an unusual name.

The story my mother tells is that she was reading Dylan Thomas while she was pregnant. Thomas’s wife was named Caitlin. When my mother decided to use the name, her cousin’s wife, who is Irish-from-Ireland (not simply of Irish descent, like my mother) told her that in Irish (or Gaelic, as many call the language in the States), the name would be pronounced KAISH-lin. My mother thought the pronunciation was beautiful, and the rest is history—or it was history, anyway, for as long as the blissful innocence of childhood lasted.