Baby Girl's Name--Focus Group

In one of the comments (I can't find it now), someone asked if we were going to continue on with our botantical theme for our kids name.

Answer: maybe.

Today, however, we were discussing the issue of

"what is the best way to spell, in English, the name of our daughter...whose name is of Hebrew origin?"

After some debate, we decided to conduct a survey of the nurses on the floor.

We wrote down three options.

"Ladies, excuse me," I said, "but I need some multi-cultural input here.

I am assuming that you don't speak Hebrew."

They nodded.

"So, my wife and I are trying to figure out which way to write the name of our daughter, which is a Hebrew one, in English so that the largest number of people will pronounce it correctly at first glance."

I showed them the three options.

#2 was eliminated and, to my amazement, for both #1 and #3, all eight respondents pronounced it perfectly. By a vote of 6-2, they settled on version 3.

So, that is the spelling that went on the Birth Certificate form.

On my way back to speaking with the NFO to share the results, I thought it would be interesting to get the country of origin of each of the nurses, in order to "bulletproof" my data set from cultural bias.

While I was asking, "where do you come from?" a strange incident occured.

A doctor, who hadn't overhead the first conversation, confronted me and said in a rude tone (and for me, that's saying something), "WHY are you asking where they are from?"

"Excuse me?"

"I have been here for 35 years and I know what you are doing. It is not
right to categorize people."

"Is this some sort of joke?"

"I know what you are doing and it's not ok."

"You know what I am doing?!" I was incredulous. "You KNOW that I am trying to figure out the best transliteration of a foreign word so that the largest number of people will find it easy to pronounce in English and in order to support my results, I am gathering the country of origin of my focus group respondents?"

I was really ticked off by this jerk.

Finally, I left and when I came back, I asked the nurses what had happened.

One said, "I don't know, I guess the doctor was just very sensitive. I didn't think it was a big deal, but in this country these days, some people get overworked about these things."

Anyway, it was quite bizarre and shows that you shouldn't jump to conclusions, especially in an inflammatory way.

I know you want to know. The respondents (all female) were from:

• Jamaica (2)
• Rwanda
• Colombia
• El Salvador
• DC
• Chicago
• North Carolina