I (knew) a girl named Princess. Regardless of the fact that princess is a title, not a name, that’s not the bad part. For simplicity’s sake, she signed her school assignments, etc. Princess, but her name was actually spelled j’Nea’t and pronounced “princess.”

She had a cap with “j’Nea’t” embroidered across the front. I tried for a while to logic out what that could mean before I finally asked her, and then my first answer was a very long sigh. It took me a while before I believed
her that it was actually her name, and that Princess really wasn’t a nickname but her family’s pronunciation of that strange assemblage of letters and apostrophes, but when her brother visited he verified the story. Evidently she was raised by her grandmother because her parents were too immature to care for a child, but they did
manage to saddle her with that name before they dropped her off for a permanent visit with Nana.

She was less than happy with her name, to say the least. To top it off, they didn’t give her a middle name. I suppose they figured they’d given her two names for the price of one, so why add another? Her mother gave her that cap; I guess she wore it just because it was from her mom, because she didn’t actually use the real spelling of her name unless she had to.

I felt pretty sorry for her. I lost touch with her after (I moved), but I think it’s probably a good bet that she legally
changed her name once she was on her own.

-I