A nurse was left confused after a kid’s parents corrected the way she pronounced Liam.
Name pronunciation can get the better of most of us, particularly if it’s a name we’ve never seen before or one that can be said in more than one way - I’m looking at you Megans, is it MEEgan or MAYgan? Can you all just decide, please?
However, there’s a bunch of names that seem so simple and obvious that no one is going to mess up, right?
Well that’s what TikTok user Lindsay thought, too, until she encountered a kid called Liam who had a pretty unusual way of saying his name.
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Lindsay, a nurse, admits that due to her southern American accent she has a tendency to ‘butcher’ certain names, but that she thought she was safe with Liam.
In the clip, she explained: “I’m a paediatric nurse and I’m from the deep, deep south, so I butcher everybody’s name.
“If it’s not something super simple like Ben or Sally, I’m going to butcher it.
“So, I see a kid’s name on our computer and I say ‘Oh, Liam, I got this. L-I-A-M. Liam. Easy’.”
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So far so good, yeah?
But this is when things take a turn.
“I go out, call the kid’s name, nobody moves. Call him again. Nobody moves. Call him again, nobody moves,” Lindsay explained.
“Finally this mum stands up and says, ‘Do you mean Yum?’ And I said, ‘No… erm, Liam?’ And she said ‘Yeah, it’s short for William’.”
It’s not often I’m lost for words, but here we are.
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For what it’s worth, the mum is right about the origin of the name Liam, it was initially a short form of the name William but now many people use it as a name in its own right.
So much so that Liam Gallagher blew his fans' minds after he shared his full name on Twitter back in 2017.
In the post, which was to promote a TV appearance, he wrote: "WILLIAM JOHN PAUL GALLAGHER 21.9.72 SON OF MARGARET TONIGHT JOOLS HOLLAND AS YOU WERE X."
Responding to the post one fan said: “S**t did anyone else not know Liam was short for William?”
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Another wrote: “Have only just realised Liam is an abbreviation of William. I'm 37 and my name is William.”
While a third commented: “Never knew he was called William.”
Claire Reid