My short and sweet surname

One thing I do like about myself, for which I can claim absolutely no credit, is my surname. It’s short and unique. If I Google it in an attempt to find a non-relative with the same last name as mine, or better yet, a heretofore unknown relative who is looking for some nice, heretofore unknown female relation to bequeath their sizeable island estate to, I often end up on the webpage of some company’s Chief Operating Officer. 

But having a unique surname can also cause confusion. For example:

• On a school trip to one of Montreal’s newspapers, each of us received a typesetting block with our name on it. This allowed us to imprint our monikers on our possessions (books, homework assignments, etc.) as well as on random pages in library books, any of our siblings’ stampable possessions—which led to many family feuds—and the “To” line of our parents’ cheques (which led to yet more family feuds). Unfortunately, my block read “Helen Cod,” and that is not my surname. I threw it in the Atlantic in the hopes that a Gadus morhua would swallow it and cause a fabulist uprising in the fishing community. 

• When I’m asked to spell my surname, people generally wait after I say the last letter, expecting more to follow. I have to tell them that those three letters are it so that we can get on with things. 

• My surname elicits questions about my ancestry. Back in the late 1970s when I was applying to different universities, I wasn’t even asked: one institution assumed I was from China or Korea and in their reply stated that they welcomed applicants from that part of the world. My great-grandfather on my father’s side was Irish, although I have never met anyone from Ireland who knows of any other Emerald Isle residents with my surname. I can’t remember exactly where he (my great grandfather) was born, but his family, who owned a distillery, exiled him to the colonies (aka Canada) because he drank too much. When I told a former coworker, who is also one of our fellow bloggers, about this, she asked how much one has to drink in Ireland for it to be considered “too much.” My great grandfather probably could have told us that but he disappeared shortly after arriving in Canada, never to be seen or heard from again.

Despite my opening sentence, I wasn’t always enamoured of my surname. Because of it I was often called a certain type of bird when I was a kid. However, there was someone who was worse off in the merciless teasing-inducing surname department: my classmate, George Moron.