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Apologies to Dr. Seuss \u2014 and the Greek Pantheon.<\/p><\/div>
\nI’m a little more understanding about the mispronunciation of Mo Willems’ name, but not much. Williams is a very common last name, so I can imagine the first time a reader sees “Willems” on a book cover,\u00a0the brain scans quickly and assumes “Williams.” But at this point, Mo Willems is possibly the best-known picture book artist in America. And actor Willem Dafoe paved the ‘Willem’ way years ago. A quick sounding-out of “Willems”\u2014a completely phonetic name, after all\u2014should do the trick.
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Apologies to Mo Willems and thanks to Danmeth\u00a0(the artist of the\u00a0Robin Williams GIF meme I cadged).<\/p><\/div> The persistent mispronunciations of some authors’ names boggle a bookseller’s brain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30239\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nI also wonder if people just don’t hear the difference between their pronunciation and others’, because if they did, surely they would become curious and ferret out the correct answer.\u00a0At least, I do. Overhearing folks variously pronounce\u00a0titles\u00a0like\u00a0“A Man Called Ove” and authors like “Ntozake Shange” always leads me to the internet for an authoritative answer. It’s just not that hard to find out.
\nOf all the things to get irked by, I admit, this is pretty small potatoes. It’s tiny tater tots, in fact. But there’s something lazy about not bothering to learn someone’s name. Maybe I’m especially annoyed by these two examples because I’ve grown up with a name no one could be reasonably expected ever to pronounce correctly upon sight, whereas Seuss and Willems are\u00a0pretty self-explanatory, as pronunciations go.
\nYears ago, I was going to introduce Kate DiCamillo at a conference breakfast. We’d never met, and she hadn’t yet appeared in any videos or interviews online, so I hadn’t heard her\u00a0speak her own name out loud. I wrote an introductory email to her and in it, I asked, “How do you pronounce your last name? Is it Dee-CaMILLo? Dih-CaMILLo? DEE-Camillo? DIH-Camillo?” And she\u00a0revealed that she pronounces it\u00a0“Dee-CaMELLo.” Good thing I asked.
\nBonus tidbit: My all-time favorite treatment of children’s book author names\u00a0comes from\u00a0Jon Scieszka’s 1996 Horn Book article<\/a>\u00a0in which he tackles “some of the peskiest, most difficult to pronounce author\/illustrator names on the children\u2019s book circuit today,” providing laugh-out-loud ‘helpful’ sentences demonstrating pronunciation and usage. (The formatting in this linked article is a little odd, but if you are willing to scroll down past the empty white spaces, your patience will be rewarded.) If you’re like me, that article will lead you to Jon Scieszka’s fantastic Zena Sutherland lecture\u2014”What’s So Funny, Mr. Scieszka<\/a>?”\u2014after the reading of which you should be in such a good mood that you won’t care if someone mangles an author’s name, even if\u00a0it’s yours.
\nWhat are your pet peeve author\/illustrator mispronunciations?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"