{"id":6268,"date":"2025-12-01T14:02:39","date_gmt":"2025-12-01T06:02:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/?p=6268"},"modified":"2025-12-01T14:02:39","modified_gmt":"2025-12-01T06:02:39","slug":"whats-in-a-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/whats-in-a-name\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s in a name?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aaqilah S. Mangarun<\/em><\/p>\n

The cashier punches my order on the register while I hand over the payment. They reach for a plastic cup nearby, a fine-tipped marker already in hand.<\/p>\n

\u201cIced latte for\u2026\u201d The cashier turns to me expectantly. \u201cYour name, miss?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAaqilah,\u201d I say. My smile automatically becomes strained as I wait for the inevitable to happen.<\/p>\n

\u201cErm, how do you spell that?\u201d<\/p>\n

For as long as I can remember, my name has been both a source of pride and quiet frustration.<\/p>\n

Seven letters. Three syllables. Four vowels and three consonants. In Arabic, it means \u201cwise,\u201d \u201cdiscerning,\u201d or sometimes \u201ceducated\u201d or \u201cintelligent.\u201d<\/p>\n

My parents, devout Muslims through and through, chose my name from a little baby name book a few weeks before I was born. They didn\u2019t want anything too fancy or complicated, like having two (or more) names or a name with a long spelling\u2014they were victims of one or the other. So they settled on my name.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t think much of it. Of course, it was an uncommon name to see or hear in a Catholic-majority community where most names sounded simple or Western, like Christian, Princess, Denise, Alex (sometimes two of those combined), and where Spanish surnames were the norm. Paired with my uncommon surname, my name made me stand out like a sore thumb. For a while, I was the only student in class whose name no one could quite place.<\/p>\n

As a child, I didn\u2019t know how to explain where my name came from. I didn\u2019t even know what it meant back then. I only knew it wasn\u2019t like theirs.<\/p>\n

At some point, I started calling myself \u201cMacy\u201d, a random name my young, developing brain picked up somewhere. I didn\u2019t know where or when, but somehow I was insistent on calling myself this. My parents perhaps found it funny and dismissed it, thinking it was only a phase\u2014but to me, it was a small act of escape. All I wanted was something easy, something people wouldn\u2019t stumble over. I wanted a name that didn\u2019t need correction.<\/p>\n

Then we moved abroad, and suddenly everything shifted.<\/p>\n

It was as if I had stepped into another world\u2014one where the rhythm of speech changed, where the air hummed with languages that rolled differently off the tongue. My classmates\u2019 names were ones I had never heard before: Nahla, Fatima, Yasmeen, Tahwa. Yet there was a warm comfort in their unfamiliarity. Their names, like mine, had roots in Arabic. When I slowly learned the language, I learned how beautiful those names meant, including mine. For the first time, my name didn\u2019t sound so strange or misplaced. It blended in, soft and unremarkable, but in the best possible way.<\/p>\n

Eventually, when we returned to the motherland, that comfort faded, and I was once again the one people paused before calling on. My biggest pet peeve? In almost every new interaction, someone misspells my name. It\u2019s mostly easy to pronounce, but on paper it becomes a conundrum: a missing letter here, an extra one there. I blame the double A\u2019s and that tricky Q. The little H at the end is an occasional culprit, too. Sometimes a U slips in after the Q, as in Quin or Queenie. People have created so many variations of my name that I can use some of them as hard-to-break passwords.<\/p>\n

For years, my reaction to my name’s misspelling ranged from annoyance to anger. Every time someone butchered it, a small part in me wilted. It felt like they\u2019d wronged me before even knowing me. At worst, I\u2019d hold a minuscule grudge against that person\u2014at least only for a while. I hated spelling it out loud, letter by letter, because I was shy and didn\u2019t want the unnecessary attention. I blamed the world for handing me such a cursed combination of letters.<\/p>\n

Worse, sometimes I felt like I didn\u2019t live up to the meaning of my name. How could I be \u201cwise\u201d when I made mistakes or acted foolishly? Each little blunder felt like proof that I wasn\u2019t living up to what I was called. It wasn\u2019t just my name that felt wrong\u2014it was me.<\/p>\n

But names, I\u2019ve learned, are only as heavy as we let them be. They can hold such a significant part of our identities that we forget we are more than just an arrangement of letters and syllables.<\/p>\n

Over time, I stopped flinching at every wrong spelling and started letting people take their best guess. If they asked how to spell it, I told them. If not, I just smiled. Somehow, it was lighter that way.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s strange to think that something as simple as a name can hold so much weight. Yet it\u2019s the first gift my parents ever gave me, and the one I\u2019ll carry for life. Maybe that\u2019s reason enough to protect it, even when the world doesn\u2019t get it right the first time.<\/p>\n

In the past, names told stories\u2014of lineage, of origin, of identity. To misspell a name is to overlook that story. But to embrace it, flaws and all, is to claim the story as your own.<\/p>\n

And perhaps that\u2019s what I\u2019ve learned most of all: my name doesn\u2019t have to fit perfectly wherever I go. It only has to fit me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Aaqilah S. Mangarun The cashier punches my order on the register while I hand over the payment. They reach for a plastic cup nearby, a fine-tipped marker already in hand. \u201cIced latte for\u2026\u201d The cashier turns to me expectantly. \u201cYour … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essay"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":false,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6268"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6268\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6269,"href":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6268\/revisions\/6269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bangsamororeview.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}