Well, AE, I do know what your name is.
I've never known anyone else by that name, but I'm astonished that you're the only person who has it. The U.S. is a big place.
More than that, for privacy's sake, I won't say.
FWIW, and intruding on a conversation between my two pals AE and Hh (and therefore at least partially forgiven), my sister's name is entirely the product of a misheard conversation between my mother (who was in Maryland while pregnant due to the Berlin Wall crisis --another long story--) and her mother up in central Maine. Evidently the long-distance connection produced quite a bit of crackle and distortion; it was 1962, after all
When my grandmother suggested that the name "Candice" was lovely, my highly creative mother heard something quite different in the second syllable, including an additional "n" and a change in vowel, and coined an absolutely unique name which had never been used before and, due to its oddity and difficulty in pronunciation, is unlikely to ever be repeated. If pushed toward a suggesting a precedent, someone would probably suggest something either vaguely Celtic or Scandinavian, and it does have a funny fairy-tale princess quality about it, I guess.
When she was born, I was two and half and had been verbal for quite some time (my mother's always said that I sounded like a 40-year-old college professor the instant I started speaking, to her simultaneous amusement and horror), and was instantly smitten by this rapturously beautiful infant. When my mother tried to make me call her by this strange and awkward name, I'd have none of it and sternly pronounced that no, her name was, instead, Tanny. I refused to call her anything else
Within a matter of weeks, no one would ever dream of calling her anything but Tanny, and that "official" name was relegated to the addressing of birthday card envelopes, her (eventual) driver's license and High School Diploma. In all situations social and professional, her name is Tanny.
