I Don’t Know How To Pronounce My Last Name

As a result, neither do you

For most of my life, I haven’t been sure how to pronounce my last name.

I know! A common problem! Who really does know how to pronounce their name? Well, everyone. Except, as it turned out, my own parents. Their last name (technically my father’s last name, which became my mother’s last name) was Daum, which was shortened from the German word daumen, which means thumb (sexy, I know). When I was growing up, as far as I was concerned, the name was pronounced with the same vowel sound as “down.” Never mind that people were forever pronouncing it with a short “o” sound, like “bomb,” and we were forever correcting them. This was simply how it was.

Sometime in my early thirties I learned an astonishing fact: no one else on the Daum side of the family pronounced the name like this. All of my cousins, aunts, and uncles pronounced it like “bomb.” My father had in fact grown up pronouncing it that way himself. The change happened when my parents, early in their marriage, got into some kind of casual conversation with a German professor who informed them that the correct pronunciation was the “down” one. Eager to break free from their families, they went along with it, thereby subjecting themselves and their future children to lifetimes of German diction enforcement. Apparently it had…