name puzzle

[calimac]

So there's this guy on TV a lot who's called Louis C.K. I don't know much about him, but I do know that he adopted that form of name in an attempt to get people to pronounce his Hungarian surname, Székely, approximately correctly.

Which affords me an opportunity to ask a question I've wondered about before: why is it that people so often consider the pronunciation of their name to be inviolate, while the spelling is infinitely malleable to accommodate it? Why is the pronunciation "real" and the spelling is not, when you have to go to a lot of trouble to change the spelling, whereas if Louis had wanted to change the pronunciation of his name to "zeh-kelly" he wouldn't have had to do anything at all.

Then there's this guy.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I rather wish you hadn't showed this to me. It's full of errors - Le Guin isn't divorced, and her husband isn't French, he's American - and nobody has corrected them and they've been up there for five years already, and I do not want to get sucked back in to editing Wikipedia.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

That's the talk page, not the article, and the article doesn't make either assertion. But I've linked the biosketch from her own website, and explicitly debunked those misunderstandings on the Talk page: see the bottom of that section and the one immediately following. And many thanks for pointing out those errors.

Do you have reliable source info for his being American?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

UKL met her husband while they were both Fulbright scholars bound for Paris in 1953. "a young historian named Charles LeGuin, a tall, handsome Georgian with a flattop who was studying at Emory University in Atlanta." - Julie Phillips [also biographer of Alice Sheldon aka James Tiptree Jr], in an untitled biographical article in 80!: Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin, ed. Karen Joy Fowler and Debbie Notkin (Seattle: Aqueduct Press, 2010), p. 171. Possibly the fact that they were in Paris when they got married has confused people. It was the French registrar who was responsible for insisting on the space between the "Le" and the "Guin". Later: "In the summer of 1954, the Le Guins returned to the United States ... took the train to Macon, Georgia, Charles's hometown. Charles got a job teaching history at Mercer University in Macon, and Ursula was hired as an instructor in French." - Phillips, op. cit, p. 173-4.

Also, there's his edition of his grandmother's diaries.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's amazing. Thanks, thanks! I've put it onto the talk page, credited to "an acquaintance".

I'm not adding it there now, but the diary and Charles's annotation also tell us the interesting and surprising names of his grandfather, and his parents: Ghu Gilbert Le Guin, second of the seven children of James M. and Cinderilla [sic] Vashti [!!] Bridges Le Guin.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

There were some great names back then. I collect U.S. Senators, and two of my favorites, both of that generation, are Xenophon Pierce Wilfley and the crashingly anticlimactic Andrieus Aristieus Jones.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

And they're still married.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

Yup, got that already.

And I didn't like their listing Annals of the Western Shore as a "novel", so I created a new category Category:Series by Ursula K. Le Guin and moved it to that one.