Name with unusual spelling can be a malady for Mladys

Having autocorrect challenge her on the spelling of her last name is a given. But having actual humans tell her she doesn't know how to spell her own name has become a malady for Linda Kroll Mlady of Naperville.

"Just spelled my last name five times to the front desk," Mlady posted on Facebook after a recent delay at a hospital security desk. "The guy tells me, 'Nope, nothing by that spelling.' So another person comes over to help. They say, 'Print your name.' So I print MLADY. They told me I spelled my own name wrong. What the heck is that???"

According to some of the three dozen responses to Mlady's post, that is just the way life is for people with names that others aren't used to seeing spelled that way.

"Yep, just like Msall, people always think it is spelled wrong," notes a Mlady cousin, who says her last name remains Msall no matter how many times autocorrect "makes it Small."

Mlady's situation is further complicated by the M'Lady Nissan dealership in Crystal Lake, which might be owned by distant relatives who added an apostrophe somewhere down the line just to make sure people pronounce it "muh-lady." Having grown up with the last name Kroll, Linda Kroll Mlady willingly took the last name of husband David Mlady when they married 26 years ago. Their three kids know the confusion Mlady can sometimes cause among the unfamiliar.

"Growing up with the name Mlady wasn't easy for them," she says of sons Nick and Kevin. But any teasing about "my lady" faded as they both grew into sturdy football players for Naperville North High School. Daughter Kristin Mlady, a former Miss Teen Illinois America, has grown accustomed to people "misspelling both her first and last names," the mom says.

In my hometown of Goodland, Ind., we all knew at least one member of a family with an unusual spelling. We had a large family named Miller. Another large family shared the pronunciation but spelled their last name Miiller. It seemed perfectly normal to us, but strangers always thought it odd when they'd think I was describing a person as a "one-eyed Miller" or a "two-eyed Miiller."

Misspelling a name is a mortal sin for newspaper reporters, and I've committed that sin a few times during my career. The first time was in a beginning reporting class at Northwestern University where I, a farm kid from a small, all-white town, settled into the back row alongside an African-American who hailed from the West Chatham neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. Given the assignment of writing a quick biography of the person sitting next to you, I earned an automatic F by misspelling that kid's last name.

He was shy, soft-spoken and had an accent that I'd never heard in my life. Not wanting to be labeled as the white hick who couldn't understand an urban black kid, I asked him a couple of times how to spell his name and guessed that he said "W-I-L-S-O-N." After a stellar career as a Washington Post sports columnist, Michael Wilbon now makes millions as a popular ESPN commentator, co-host of the "Pardon The Interruption" TV show and frequent guest on ESPN 1000 radio in Chicago. I now have no problem spelling his last name.

That is not something I can say about the family I married into in 1988. My wife's last name, terHorst, comes up Terhorft on caller ID, and spell check wants to change it to Terrorist. Adding to the confusion, she doesn't capitalize the initial letter, but does capitalize the H in the middle, which sometimes gets her listed under H instead of T. Other members of her family use Terhorst and TerHorst. It keeps me on my toes.

Mlady, who is president of Mlady Commercial Services, which handles everything from janitorial services to snow removal, says the new online world often is easier to deal with than people.

"If we book anything, we try to book it online," she says. That way, she generally can type Mlady once, without having to explain herself.

There is one place where the Mlady family never gets questioned about their name. Her kids have fond memories of those visits during their childhood.

"When we'd go to the Renaissance Faire when they were young," Mlady says, "they'd ask, 'How does everybody know our name?'"