I mean because it was considered very odd. There's no reason someone can't do it if they want to, of course — in this case it was unintentional, though.

Sí, ¡yo sé!

Ha! How unfortunate. (It could be worse, though — my friend in the US had a classmate whose name was pronounced "bitch".)

I always use linda for cute/pretty/darling/sweet, not beautiful/gorgeous, etc, but my Spanish isn't all that great so feel free to ignore me on that!

Yes! (She was quite, luckily.) My mum knew someone called Marvellous, though, which is even better than "Cute".

I think it might have been Spain — I can't remember exactly but it was definitely somewhere that they considered it very odd! (As as aside, it is such an international name, isn't it? I'd never given it any thought before but yeah, there are Lindas from all over the place.)

Totally true!

I love it.

I actually met someone with a teenaged daughter named Linda a little while ago! She was named for an aunt or grandmother or something — the funny thing was that they then moved to a Spanish-speaking country and everyone thought the parents were very odd for naming their child something like that.

A friend and I went on the Baby Name Wizard website once — we thought of names we would name kids if we had them right then that second, and deliberately picked things that we thought wouldn't be all trendy… and then we checked them all on the website, and every single name we came up with was spiking massively right…

I know this is only slightly related, but I became friends with someone who lived in my apartment building who used to be all "hey girl!" and I would ignore him. One day he asked me (for the zillionth time) why I always ignore him and why I'm so rude, so I stopped and explained the whole thing. We had a good chat…

I was once in a car in the desert with a friend (we're both girls) and a bloke on a motorbike kept trying to ride really near us and kept waving at us, and we were all "UGH STUPID BOY GO AWAY"… and then we realised he was telling us that our tires were cracking in the heat. The garage we pulled into told us we were…

I once got "That's a really nice clutch bag!" which I thought was very specific. It was a really nice clutch bag.

Yeah, ours goes through several spellings on the records here before it settles down as the one that still exists today. I found cousins on Facebook by searching the name!

This post is teaching me about American name-change craziness! I'm English and I just changed my name really easily. (I was hyphenating it and my husband wasn't, and I was getting married in the US and wasn't sure the foreign marriage certificate would be useable as legal proof, etc). It was so easy; I could just…

Yeah, I've got two first names and two last names and I've never had a problem with it.

Other cultures handle it fine, though – the double-barrelled thing isn't is pretty normal in Spain.

Whoa, I had no idea it was so hard. Here you can just do a deed poll any time you like, for any reason, where you say "My name is now Super Amazing Name-Having Person" — I did that when I changed my name and it was super duper easy.

I just recently hyphenated my name and love it because I can sort of justifiably use one or the other or both whenever it suits me. My kids will be hyphenated and can do what they like with it as they grow up — I feel like I'm giving them the option of having either name (or both).

I actually thought of changing my name to the original family name — my great-great grandparents came from Eastern Europe and the name was so hard to spell (and they were so illiterate) that it ended up getting formalised here in the UK as a weird misspelled and totally unique name. Some branches of my family kept it…