The Gyllenhaal Experiment

February 27, 2019 11:21 AM

Can you spell these names? How common are your mistakes?
posted by the man of twists and turns (49 comments total)

I got M. Night S_ on the first try!

Note: I think there are 15 names to test against, then it took me to my combined results.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:21 AM on February 27, 2019

They shouldn't show you the branches while you're guessing. You can use them to guide your answer, though it's not foolproof.
posted by Sangermaine at 11:28 AM on February 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

Wow, I thought I'd do OK but I sucked! Not sure whether to be embarrassed or relieved...
posted by widdershins at 11:28 AM on February 27, 2019 [4 favorites]

I'm a bit ashamed I got Shia's right.
posted by wellred at 11:31 AM on February 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

I did worse than I expected...mainly because of (I'm copy-and-pasting right now) Scarlett Johansson and Matthew McConaughey. They've been famous so long that I guess I never learned how their names worked. I got Zooey Deschanel and Chuck Palahniuk right, but I wasn't 100% sure of it until I clicked for confirmation. (I guess that year on OKCupid was good for something.)
posted by grandiloquiet at 11:32 AM on February 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

I've only gotten Minaj correct so far. I don't feel too bad about it, spelling is tricky enough in english and names are definitely the space where spelling rules and logic seem to go out the window. Which is fine, the point of a name is to be made-up sounds that don't refer to anything useful.
posted by GoblinHoney at 11:36 AM on February 27, 2019

I'm pretty sure I only know because of the number of times I have referred to Actual Cannibal Shia LaBeouf in conversations with friends online.
posted by Sequence at 11:39 AM on February 27, 2019 [5 favorites]

I failed because I didn't know who half of them were.
posted by Grither at 11:43 AM on February 27, 2019 [15 favorites]

I mean, all this shows is that ALL last names are fucking impossible to spell and we should just abolish them in favor of strings of emoji.
posted by lydhre at 11:46 AM on February 27, 2019 [5 favorites]

I defnitely don't think that the point of names is to be "made-up sounds that don't refer to anything useful", unless you think that of the people they refer to?

Surnames from other languages can certainly strain English spelling, but that doesn't mean there are no rules, it just means overlapping sets of adaptations/transliterations into English (Palahniuk from Ukrainian, Poehler from German, etc. etc.)
posted by Earthtopus at 11:47 AM on February 27, 2019 [7 favorites]

I knew I was bad at remembering actor/celebrity names. But I didn't realize just how bad I was, that I could blank out even when given a photo, their first name and the first letter of their surname. ("You know, that guy who was in that movie with... whatsername..?")
posted by Kabanos at 11:47 AM on February 27, 2019

This did some truly insane shit to my phone's autocorrect as I tried to type. No idea how, first one I got was Shia and as I started typing "l" it kept auto-correct adding letters after and then as I tried to backspace it added more letters and I had to just shut the page when it was at "Shia LALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALA" or so.

100% baffling. I assume they're doing some weird shit in JS that's causing it.
posted by tocts at 11:48 AM on February 27, 2019 [3 favorites]

I'm shocked at how badly all these people spell their own names.
posted by darksasami at 11:48 AM on February 27, 2019 [12 favorites]

What Earthtopus said, most of these (at least the ones I got) are not English surnames. It seems kind of othering and gross to harp on the unspellability of names that clearly don't and shouldn't follow common English pronunciation/spelling rules.
posted by aiglet at 11:54 AM on February 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

Needs more Ah-nold. And Pete Buttigueg Buttigieg (topical!). And Bandicoot Cummerbund Butterscotch Carbonate Blunderbuss Cormorant dude from Dr. Strange.
posted by Rhaomi at 11:58 AM on February 27, 2019 [2 favorites]

I once had to assemble a master list of a couple hundred of my colleagues (for their name tags, etc.) for a conference. The people with names of uncommon derivation were dead easy because they were mostly the only Kinos-Varo, Mansaram or Osunanmi I had ever met. However, for those with names more frequently encountered (in this culture) I was a little fuzzier on. Is that guy from Marketing whom I know slightly Alan, Allan, Alen, or Allen? Is his last name McDonald or MacDonald? Is the D in his last name usually capitalized? Wait, is it maybe MacDonnell? I’d better go see if he has ever sent me an e-mail...
posted by ricochet biscuit at 12:01 PM on February 27, 2019 [5 favorites]

Spelling bees are a thing in English because of how much of our language doesn't follow common English pronunciation and spelling rules. With the exceptions of M. Night Shyamalan and Nicki Minaj, all of the celebrities picked are from the US (or Canada), so it doesn't seem that othering to me. It's a normal part of English for spelling to get weird.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 12:04 PM on February 27, 2019 [3 favorites]

so it doesn't seem that othering to me.

Names are a hodge-podge of culture/migration/history. I agree and don't see this as othering, this is more an experiment in how we remember names, how we work with phonetics and the English language. The only thing that could possibly be othering is how people respond when they hear a name they're not familiar with.

WRONG: “That's a weird name.”
ME: “It's not a weird name, it's a name.”

CORRECT: “I really like how your name sounds. It's beautiful.”

I say this as a person of color with a name that is not common who talks on the phone for a living in customer support. I'd say at least once or twice a day I hear someone tell me that my name is "weird" or "different". My name isn't weird or different. It's my fucking name. I'll stop now. This has been Fizz's Ted Talk on names and culture.
posted by Fizz at 12:11 PM on February 27, 2019 [16 favorites]

It's "Monaach" dammit.
posted by Namlit at 12:11 PM on February 27, 2019

I was a contestant in the 1988 US National Spelling Bee, which is 100000% the only time I will ever be on ESPN (kidding; they started airing it in 1994). I absolutely took this to see if I could spell the names after seeing them but not focusing on learning the spellings.

It is also very icky to make fun of names because they come from another language, and a crapton of them have concrete meanings in those languages.
posted by wellred at 12:12 PM on February 27, 2019 [4 favorites]

I have gotten a lot of things wrong in my life. I'm wrong a lot. I'm not ashamed of that.

I don't think I have ever gotten anything as wrong as I just got Chuck Palahniuk's name.
posted by The Bellman at 12:30 PM on February 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

Which is fine, the point of a name is to be made-up sounds that don't refer to anything useful.
posted by GoblinHoney

I'm sorry, what the hell?
posted by fiercecupcake at 1:04 PM on February 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

A. Names are just weird. I remember some database class where they gave us a handout of all the properties you couldn't assume a name would have as an example of how big the problem is; I feel like it was at least a page.

B. Celebrity names are not a thing that I feel like I need to worry about spelling correctly.

C. Palahniuk can probably live with it.
posted by aspersioncast at 1:22 PM on February 27, 2019

I remember some database class where they gave us a handout of all the properties you couldn't assume a name would have as an example of how big the problem is; I feel like it was at least a page.

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:26 PM on February 27, 2019 [7 favorites]

CORRECT: “I really like how your name sounds. It's beautiful.”

No, surely silence, maybe a nod.
posted by Segundus at 1:26 PM on February 27, 2019 [3 favorites]

my actual last name which is quite "normal" sounding from a anglo-euro perspective has at least three "correct" spellings, nine if you allow Mc and Mac into the mix ... and then there's a certain Disney film that messed everything up further. As for my particular spelling, I doubt it's correctly guessed more than 10-percent of the time.
posted by philip-random at 1:58 PM on February 27, 2019

Well, that was humbling. 5/15. I got Nicki^*, Amy, Zooey^*, Ms. Street, and Mr. Culkin^* correct.

^*I had to double check that these were correct before posting, and they weren't even the names requested.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 2:01 PM on February 27, 2019

I didn't know a lot of those people and the ones I did know I failed miserably at spelling.

The word that has tripped me up for years: chihuahua. Chihuahua happens to be a type of cheese I buy regularly, so I have probably written it* on my grocery list once or twice a month for the past two years. I learned how to spell it this January.

Signed, A School Spelling Bee Winner** in 1998

*or an approximation of
**I almost immediately lost at Regionals but most of what I remember from the experience was walking into the wrong bathroom, turning to run out and slamming into a man's legs as I did so.
posted by Emmy Rae at 2:04 PM on February 27, 2019 [2 favorites]

The spelling Scarlett Johansson absolutely makes sense given her Danish ancestry but the way people pronounce it is going to cause my mind to hear it as *Johanssen until the day I die.
posted by Soi-hah at 2:17 PM on February 27, 2019

Sometimes I wonder if Pete Buttigieg ever can be President -- not because he's gay, not because he's progressive, but because people simply would not try to get a handle on that name. It would be "lol butts" forever. I might wonder the same thing about Jeff Flake, whose name lacks presidential timber, if I cared about him.
posted by Countess Elena at 2:20 PM on February 27, 2019 [4 favorites]

because people simply would not try to get a handle on that name

Well, Barack Hussein Obama (as my Republican relatives love to call him) was elected after 9/11. So I don't count Mayor Pete out.
posted by Emmy Rae at 2:35 PM on February 27, 2019 [2 favorites]

CORRECT: “I really like how your name sounds. It's beautiful.”

No, surely silence, maybe a nod.

That too. Just anything other than the preceding which is what I always get.
posted by Fizz at 2:41 PM on February 27, 2019

Countess Elena: "Sometimes I wonder if Pete Buttigieg ever can be President -- not because he's gay, not because he's progressive, but because people simply would not try to get a handle on that name. It would be "lol butts" forever."

I assume that's why he's emphasizing his first name -- because what possible potty humor could you pull out of a name like "Peter"?
posted by Rhaomi at 3:11 PM on February 27, 2019 [3 favorites]

CORRECT: “I really like how your name sounds. It's beautiful.”

No, surely silence, maybe a nod

"Did you just pull that from a bag of Scrabble tiles?"
posted by Zack_Replica at 3:29 PM on February 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

Huh, I actually got Scarlett, Shia, Matthew, and M. Knight wrong. I think I overthought it to some degree.
posted by limeonaire at 4:10 PM on February 27, 2019

I seem to have shaped my life in a way that allows me to never have to mention a specific celebrity or sportsball slingster. And I like myself, dammit!
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 5:15 PM on February 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

mainly because of (I'm copy-and-pasting right now) Scarlett Johansson and Matthew McConaughey.

I KNEW when I saw McConaughey that I was going to blow it, because I've struggled with that one before. Johansson I've just never thought of enough to want to use her name. The only other one I missed was Shyamalan, and that was just a stupid mistake (transposed the M and the L).

I've always had a very strong memory for how words look, and names aren't excluded from that. My mom (an inveterate bad speller, despite an English PhD) told me that when I was a kid I wouldn't go to a dictionary to show her how a word was spelled--I'd go to the book where I remembered seeing the word before and find the damn thing. In a way I find myself still doing that mentally.
posted by dlugoczaj at 6:47 PM on February 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

I can't spell much of anything anymore. I've been using spellcheck for most of my adult life. When I was a lot younger, I used to pride myself on how rarely various spellcheckers caught a mistake. Now I just click on the little red underline and let it show me what I should have typed. Sigh. Needless to say, I noped out of this exercise pretty quickly. Too much of a metaphor for my life.
posted by treepour at 6:50 PM on February 27, 2019

I tried but who the hell are these people
posted by The otter lady at 6:56 PM on February 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

I give up, I was spelling them all wrong and usually I am a good speller. I feel ashamed and stoopid right now.

"people simply would not try to get a handle on that name."

There are plenty of studies about having a name that is hard to spell and/or pronounce hurts you when looking for jobs, so yeah, I thought similarly. Especially since that name isn't at all intuitive, I've read several explanations of how to say it and I cannot remember a single damn one of them now. Then again, in all honesty I don't plan on putting in a lot of work to remember Pete since I don't exactly think he's going to be a top candidate or relevant to my life in the future at the moment. I kinda feel like he needs to build up his political reputation before going straight on for president when right now for most of the country he's "Who?"

I've known the occasional person whose name was pronounced 100% differently from how it was spelled--I sadly won't give examples because of Google--but I would have to write out how it was said and then go back and forth translating in my head depending on whether or not I had to talk to them vs. remembering who that was when I saw the name written out.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:16 PM on February 27, 2019

the point of a name is to be made-up sounds that don't refer to anything useful.

In Chinese names are just regular words.

There's a comedy bit about college professors gathering at the library the night before start of term. They don't want to embarrass themselves calling roll the next day. But they've all got the one student named with some weird character none of them have ever seen before. They search in vain through ever larger dictionaries. No luck.

Admitting defeat, they consult the librarian, who tells them, oh, yes, this is a real character, albeit a hapax legomenon. I don't remember how it's pronounced either, but the pronunciation is known. Chinese has a form of constrained writing where you use only homophones. This appears in one such poem, a really obscure one from the 7th century. We have a copy...out on loan...
posted by meaty shoe puppet at 8:18 PM on February 27, 2019 [3 favorites]

Something interesting about the spelling paths for Alanis Morissette: 1 R, 2 S (correct) was about equally common as 1 R, 1 S, but 2 R, 1 S (which is the most wrong in terms of edit distance) was like six times as common as 2 R, 2 S. It seems like "there's exactly one double letter" is a pertinent part of some people's mental representation of the name. I've seen this with other words too -- Google returns an order of magnitude more hits for Snowmaggedon than Snowmagedon or Snowmaggeddon (the correct spelling, insofar as such a word has one, is Snowmageddon).


The word that has tripped me up for years: chihuahua.

My parents kept a flyer they found that said "LOST: BLACK CHUWAWA", which is funny but not as funny as the sign I saw for a lost "Datsun Terrier mix".
posted by aws17576 at 10:02 PM on February 27, 2019 [6 favorites]

Surnames from other languages can certainly strain English spelling, but that doesn't mean there are no rules, it just means overlapping sets of adaptations/transliterations into English (Palahniuk from Ukrainian, Poehler from German, etc. etc.)

This really tripped me up with Shia, who I recognized, because I was like "Oh! I speak French and know how to spell boeuf and know that it's a masculine noun."

*Confidently goes and types in 'LeBoeuf' only to emit an audible cry of 'what?!' when the answer is wrong.*
posted by andrewesque at 4:59 AM on February 28, 2019 [5 favorites]

I’ve always been a star speller, so I was really shocked when I realized I have no idea how to spell Matthew M’s last name. I think it’s that I mostly hear it rather than read it? The closest I got was “McCoughnehey.” Comically bad. The city of Austin is going to ceremonially eject me, I’m sure of it.

Brb, pronouncing each syllable of his last name to myself as though it were spelled phonetically, to try and cement the spelling. “Mc - con - aug - hey.” I’ll think about McDonald’s, Trump, toilet augers, and yelled greetings.

Also, it was downright traumatic to realize that Shia’s last name is not spelled the same as French for “beef.” I questioned whether the quiz was correct, whether I actually knew how to spell “boeuf”, and whether I had suddenly developed dyslexia.
posted by snowmentality at 5:21 AM on February 28, 2019 [3 favorites]

I also went with the french spelling for Shia, and was also disappointed. For me the names went from "oh I can spell that" to "uh..." and a fair amount of "who the fuck even is this person" and finally "Minaj? Really? People can't spell Minaj?"
posted by bile and syntax at 6:15 AM on February 28, 2019

I seem to have shaped my life in a way that allows me to never have to mention a specific celebrity or sportsball slingster.

For me, it's the middle aged version of "aging out". I don't just not have an opinion on pretty much every name in the Gyllenhaal Experiment, nobody expects me to. Though I did run into someone the other day, retirement age, who was complaining about Justin Beiber for some reason. It struck me as very odd.
posted by philip-random at 8:52 AM on February 28, 2019 [2 favorites]

> Justin Beiber

Yes, yes... Isn't he the new second oboist for the Boston Philharmonic?
posted by kleinsteradikaleminderheit at 10:49 AM on February 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

Yes I knew who these people were. I still spelled every single one wrong.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 10:50 PM on February 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

Minaj? Really? People can't spell Minaj?

Well, this site says that Minhaj is many times more common - I didn't do the quiz because my ego doesn't need that, but I probably would have put the h in there.
posted by mosst at 12:43 PM on March 1, 2019