MY NAME is not Ivy.
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It is Ivy.
Where I come from that is pronounced Eevoo.
Sounds like emu.
Ha ha.
You won’t know how many times I have had to smile at that one since we arrived here from Denmark 38 years ago.
So imagine trying to deliver that name from behind a mask, even for something as simple as my daily dose of caffeine.
“Hi, mumble, mumble, lactose free, mumble, mumble, sugar, mumble, mumble.”
“What name?”
“Ivy.”
“Sorry?”
“EE-VOO!!!!”
“Right, thanks.”
Five minutes later.
“Coffee for Emu.”
OMG.
Yes, I came from Denmark.
But Mum is Dutch, it was the ‘70s, she was a little, well, a little Bohemian.
Apparently you had to be there. And while I was (just), that name has been with me ever since.
In a land where everyone with a long name gets it abbreviated and everyone with a short name seems to have their elongated.
Unless no-one can really work out what your name actually is.
And no, I am not alone in this Anglophile world of mispronunciation.
My younger sister’s name is Signe.
Works a treat in Scandanavia, not so hot Down Under.
So I got Emu and she got cygnet, as in a baby swan.
More ha ha.
Signe’s name is pronounced Seen-ah.
Now let’s extrapolate that personal pain.
Once we got through the migration system, we relocated to Mount Isa. That’s the middle-of-nowhere Mount Isa.
Where, you have correctly surmised, there were no other kids in town with funny accents and names such as Ee-voo and Seen-ah.
I always thought Signe got a better deal than me (I mean what rhymes with Ee-voo?), but my little sis soon got sick of the ‘Seen-ah in the grocery store’ cracks.
Today, Signe lives in Queensland where the carry-on about masks and lockdowns and all the other disasters into which Victoria keeps stumbling are not reality, they’re just a joke, so people can point south and say thing like: “Look at what those Victorians are doing now”.
But it was about to get worse in those early Mount Isa days.
Our parents told us we were expecting another child.
We had no idea they were going to adopt. I mean, they were parents, right? Parents don’t have sex, do they?
A few months later, we realised our mother and father weren’t just sleeping together, judging by the bulge in Mum’s stomach they were doing other stuff in bed as well.
Ewwwww!
So in the fullness of time, the Jensens took delivery of a third daughter.
Signe and I panicked, rushed down to the Selwyn Private Hospital, pushed Dad out of the way, snatched the pen from Mum, grabbed the paperwork to register the birth, scratched out the beginnings of God knows what she was trying to write and I personally filled in the part where it said: ‘Name of child’.
For the past couple of decades, Tara always sends me a message or a card on her birthday, thanking me for her name.
To Tara, Mum and Dad are, always, Mum and Dad.
For Signe and me, it’s different. You might even think petty, but what’s good for the goose is just as good for the gander (and you won’t hear that expression in Scandinavia).
We both call them by their Danish diminutives.
She’s Mor.
He’s Far.
So how Far would you go for Mor?
Ha ha.
It’s a little sad, I know, but it works for us.
And it works for millions of Scandinavians.
But here. Right.
PS: I have saved the best for last. In our pubescent pettiness we also encourage all our children to also call their grandies by their ethnic identities. Making Dad Pake (pronounced Parker, and it’s Flemish, where Mum is from in The Netherlands) and she is Mormor, which is Danish for grandma (mum's mum), not someone from a church in Salt Lake City.
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