Why I Changed My Name Three Times
At birth, my fresh-off-the-boat Italian parents named me Margherita. Mahr-geh-REE-tah.
Yeah, kind of a mouthful for non-Italian speakers. The fun fact is that we weren’t even living in Italy at the time—I was born in California and my family had no plans to move back to Italy for the foreseeable future, so you’d think my parents could have picked something more easily translatable to the language of our host country. Alas, they did not. In fact, three years later (still in California) they named my brother Giovanni. Jo-VAHN-nee.
To Italians, margherita means daisy, like the flower. To Greeks, it’s similar to the word for pearl, margaritár. To Italians, Greeks, and everyone else, it’s also the world renown pizza, though often incorrectly spelled Margarita on menus.
Let’s get one thing straight, once and for all. Margarita is a Mexican cocktail. Margherita is a pizza with tomato sauce, mozzarella, and basil. I would know.
Thus with my blessing, go forth and challenge any food institution that claims to serve Margarita Pizza. I have yet to find a pizza with tequila and lime topping. But I diverge.
I spoke but Italian for the first five years of my life, at which point my parents thought it completely normal to plop me into a kindergarten where, naturally, all the other students spoken but English for the first five years of their lives. As if that wasn’t enough, halfway through the year, my classmates had already mastered the art of writing their names—their Saras and Johns and Megans and CJs—while I continued to grapple with the ten-letter behemoth I’d been baptized with. Mahr-geh-REE-tah. In desperation, my teacher asked my parents if I had a nickname I could use.
Yes, my parents said. Titti, they said.
Titti. TEE-TEE. Think CJ, but TT. In Italy it’s a common nickname not just for Margherita but Caterina, Christina, Matilde, and other names. My parents even call each other Titti as Americans might call each other honey or sweetheart.
Ah, yes, my naïve kindergarten teacher said. That will do.
So from one day to the next, I went from having the longest, most complicated name in my kindergarten class, to arguably one of the easiest. My friends and I even sang a rhyming song about the spelling: “T-I-T-T-I!”
And thus I became Titti. My school was a small private institution with little student turnover every year, so the same kids that knew me as Titti in kindergarten knew me as Titti all the way into eighth grade. My parents started calling me Titti, my brother was raised complaining about Titti, our friends in America were used to our foreign names anyways—my mother is Mirca (Meer-kah) and my father is Gian Paolo (Jh-aen-paaow-low)—and all was well in Italy, where no one ever misspelled Margherita Pizza on our menus.
Then in my eighth grade year I started touring high schools, where for the first time in a long while (I’d had the same friends for the past decade) I had to start introducing myself to strangers. I watched the student ambassadors wrap their tongues around my unfamiliar name, and I was confused.
TT. CJ. It’s just two letters, what’s the difference? Then, one student enlightened me.
“Titti? Like, titis? Like, boobs?”
I was mortified. The damage had been done, and there was no going back. From that moment on, every time I heard my nickname, I thought of boobs. It would have been funny, really, if I’d been anyone but a thirteen year old pubescent girl already self-conscious about her body in the first place.
Something had to change, and my parents’ decision to move to Boston came at the perfect time. Not only was I moving across the country, but I was starting high school, too. What better time to start using a different name?
Conscious of the fact that I should pick something that would also be easy for my family to use (a thoughtfulness they had not bestowed upon me at birth) I decided on Maggie. It was a direct translation of Megghi (the more common Italian nickname for Margherita) which my Italian friends already called me, and certainly had nothing to do with boobs.
And so Maggie I was, and my conversations with strangers started to change. My introduction as Titti had previously led to questions like, “Where does your name come from? Where are you from?”
At most, Maggie now welcomed a smile that said, Oh good, that’s easy to remember. Sometimes they also added, “That’s my dog’s name!”
My heritage emerged, if at all, when I was asked about family, when I answered with my Jo-VAHN-nee and Meer-KAH and JH-aen-PAAOW-low. I liked talking about my Italian upbringing, but I also loved the simplicity of Maggie. No boobs.
My brother had the most genuine trouble with this change. When I started inviting my friends over to our house, I watched him pause every time he wanted to mention my name, and say Maggie like he was talking about a stranger. It felt weird for me, too, to hear him say it. Once or twice he let Titti slip, and my friends would look at me in bewilderment.
So I told them my name story—how I went from a ten letter behemoth to boobs to essentially a dog name—and they found it hilarious. One girlfriend even asked me why I hadn’t picked the name Rita, from MargheRITA. I definitely don’t know any dogs named Rita.
But Maggie served me fine throughout high school and college. The only exception was the semester I studied abroad in Paris. During the spring of 2019 I lived with a French family who called me MAHR-geh-REE-tah (imagine a lovely French accent), breezing through the vowels and consonants like it was any other French name, and so I decided not to offer them my nick name. It was the first time in my life that I’d been called by my full name—besides the few times I’d talked back to my mother, of course.
Flash forward to the second half of my senior year of college, when the Covid pandemic sent us all home. I used my new and unwanted free time to finally make a LinkedIn, and it was there that I started to see a movement, mostly from ethnically diverse American employees, demanding that their employers try harder to use and pronounce their real names.
I figured I had it easier than most of them. Margherita is hard to pronounce correctly but easy to pronounce acceptably.
Maybe, though, I don’t have to feel bad for my own professional acquaintances who routinely preface my name with “I’m probably going to butcher it.”
Maybe I don’t have to rush to my, “That’s alright, I go by Maggie.”
Now, I let them struggle a little bit. Maybe that’s what my parents had wanted all along: for people to pause at my name. Consider it. Work a little harder.
Yes, you probably will butcher it. No, I won’t be offended. At least it’s not Margarita.
Margherita. Mahr-geh-REE-tah.
