My Polish last name is ten letters long. My Midwestern family has always pronounced it “jake-uh-bow-ski,” stressing the first and third syllables. Naturally, to me, it has been a simple, four-syllable name, as easy to say as Oppenheimer or O’Shaughnessy. Yet for others it’s been one of “those” names, as odd as Lipizanner, or worse, Blagojevich.

People forced to pronounce my name for the first time often give up after the first two syllables. Sometimes they pretend to stutter, saying, “Jakka, uh, Jakku, uh?” as if trying to remember the lyrics to a James Brown song. Or they try to stare my name to verbal life from the roster or clipboard in their hand waiting until the owner of this jacked-up last name chimes in to save them. Then upon being told, “It’s jake-uh-bow-ski,” people smile, saying with false sweetness, “Oh, of course,” before continuing down the list toward their next victim, usually a kindred spirit of mine with one of “those” names from China, or worse, India.

In the sixth grade, my name spawned the utterly stupid insult: Jack-off-a-bow-ski. It was a poor botched insult with a verb smooshed in there. The moniker was, in fact, so dumb that the kids who called me that quit it the same week they started. Maybe because it was too hard to say? Or maybe because they knew that they had not struck upon anything hurtfully cool. They seemed to understand that when you jacked-up someone’s name the result needed to be a short wicked-sweet noun or adjective full of meanness, like calling Heather heifer or Bobby blobby. It made no sense to waste a lot of breath on, “Here comes that Polish dork Matt Jack-off-a-bow-ski” when you could just yell, “Hey, watch out for blobby.”

My first week in college a professor doing roll call called me Matthew “Yah-ku-bov-ski.” I replied, “Actually, sir, it’s Jake-uh-bow-ski.” He said, “Actually, it’s Ya-ku-bov-ski.” I laughed. He was right after all. Why had I been making my name easier to say all these years? His way was a lot more fun. And being a professor, he sure knew how to make it sound harder than it really was.

So now, I can be Matt Yahkubovski, and if I introduce myself thus, you know I’ve either been drinking, or I think you look sympathetic to Polish nationals, or both. However people say it, I’m now content with my name’s odd power, and I revel quietly in the jacked-up-ed-ness it brings to the party.

by Matthew Jakubowski
Philadelphia, PA