Pity the trials of the serially misspelled

Gina Barreca loves her name, even if others struggle.

Ijust finished grading an essay by an otherwise diligent student who submitted his paper to Professor ‘‘Beracca.’’ Basically, it’s as if the kid played a whackamole game with the letters in my name. He randomly assembled the consonants and vowels into a vague pattern and hoped for the best.

He got a passing grade. He spelled the names of the authors under discussion correctly.

Also, this is not exactly the first time my name has been misspelled.

As a student at Dartmouth College in the mid1970s, I was aware that I didn’t exactly blend in. Some kids had names that were easy to spell insofar as major buildings on campus had the same names carved into granite above the entryways.

I sort of suspected that I was the only child of Sicilian descent to be part of the institution — apart from Michael Corleone in The Godfather, and he was a fictional character created by Mario Puzo.

So I wasn’t terribly surprised when I received a piece of mail from Dartmouth addressed to Regina R. O’Barreca ’79.

The college tried to make me Irish. It was like the alumni office had no alternative. Although a nonWASP ethnic group, at least the Irish had ties to Great Britain.

Think I’m making this up? I don’t have the imagination.

My alma mater still has trouble getting it right. Even when thanking me for the modest help I’ve offered the fundraising efforts, the most recent class newsletter messed with my name. Really? Our 40th reunion is next year. I suspect the only chance I have of convincing them to pay attention is to call myself Regina McRose McBarreca, Marchioness of Sheepshead Bay. The guys were nice about it once I pointed out the error; they apologised, adorably and sincerely. And then they asked me to make lasagna.

I’m kidding, of course — but only about the lasagna part. They no longer eat gluten.

They’re not alone. Although I was on Oprah a few times (see how casually I mention that?), the last time I appeared, Oprah called me ‘‘Rebecca Barreca’’ conflating my two names. My family members were outraged. They also thought I looked ‘‘a little heavy’’ on television. The attention you’ve hoped for doesn’t always turn out the way you picture it.

I always thought, were I to have a daughter, I would have named her ‘‘Barbara Rebecca Barreca.’’ It would have been fun to listen when people on the phone asked ‘‘Can you spell that for me, please?’’ Try saying it out loud and you’ll understand. Telemarketers would have hung up halfway through ‘‘Rebecca’’.

(And, at 15, she probably would have renamed herself ‘‘Kate.’’)

My Brooklyn uncles used to say, ‘‘It doesn’t matter what they say about you as long as they spell your name right,’’ so regularly that you would have thought they meant it. But the swagger punctuating the line was undermined by the uncles’ simultaneous insistence that you should ‘‘never give anybody your real name’’.

I should make clear that’s not as if a lot of people were asking. Some of these guys didn’t even have Social Security numbers, let alone business cards or publicists. Did it really matter if they spelled your name correctly on the ‘‘WANTED’’ poster?

But I love my name. Even in marriage, I never considered changing it. Having learned how to spell it, I was keeping it.

My first name, in contrast, shuttles between ‘‘Regina’’ when I am in academic mode and ‘‘Gina’’ when I’m being myself. I first adopted ‘‘Regina’’ in high school. I thought it made me sound fancier, smarter, thinner (I thought the capital ‘‘G’’ was a fat letter) and more regal.

Naturally, none of it worked. But at least when strangers send letters asking for favours or leave messages smacking of false intimacy, which begin with ‘‘Hello there, Regina!’’ as if we’re old buddies, I know they’re faking it.

As for regular misspellings, there are actually some benefits. My bank will now deposit checks into my account as long as somewhere there are Gs, Bs, Rs and Cs after ‘‘Pay to the Order of’’. The sequence is inconsequential.

I’m happy to apply the same flexibility and generosity to the otherwise diligent student. Once.

Gina Barreca is an author and English professor at the University of Connecticut.