My name is Zoë

This week I was pleasantly surprised on more than one occasion that people who I am not familiar with, wrote my name correctly. My name is Zoë. Not Zoe.

Those two dots over the e are called a diaeresis. Without going into the complications of what that means, essentially it's an indicator that my name is pronounced as two syllables. Without the diaeresis, my name would rhyme with Joe.

My parents have always told me that they chose the Greek version of Zoë which is derived from zōō, meaning life. And so, they taught me to write my name as Zoë. As a child, I knew where the two dots went long before I mastered the tricky curves of a lower case 'e'.

But the funny part of the story comes in that my birth certificate reads Zoe. When I asked my Mum about this recently, she was adamant that she and my Dad had written it as Zoë on the forms when I was born. But being brand new parents it wasn't exactly their priority to confirm that this had been correctly recorded by the people who processed the forms. However it's officially recorded, my parents insist that they named me Zoë.

In the past week, I've been thinking a lot about the power of a name. I was inspired when I read about Maitreyi Ramakrishnan's insistence that people pronounce her name correctly. I think that there is such strength in claiming the name that is yours.

It made me think about how often I accept my name being written as Zoe. Sometimes that's out of laziness (figuring out how the keyboard on any given computer wants me to shortcut the 'ë' is sometimes more effort than I feel it's worth). But other times, it's because I feel like I'll be putting someone in an awkward position by pointing out that they haven't spelt my name correctly.

I'm also hyperaware that other people of colour have much bigger name problems than I do. I don't want to seem like I'm splitting hairs over a name that is ultimately familiar to the mainstream and rarely mispronounced. But I think that if someone with a name like mine, can start being pedantic about the correct spelling of it - I might just make it easier for those with names are less familiar to the people around them.

So hello, my name is Zoë! Thanks to those of you who made my day by spelling it correctly.