I have a very short name. Two words, four letters each. Mark Coen. Seems very simple, doesn't it? After a lot of thinking, there are few people I know with shorter ones, the only one I know personally is this guy. Then there' s this Hall of Famer and this architect (which reminded me about this other architect).

So how is it that a name as short as mine gets misspelled so often?

The last name is the usual culprit, as there are many more C-O-H-E-Ns in the world than C-O-E-Ns (or perhaps just more here in the States). In any event, I have clear memory of having to correct the school librarian when I was in second grade as to the spelling of my last name. From there on out, I've pretty much taken to spelling it out for people from the start.

Spelling my first name with a 'c' at the end is less prevalent, but crops up from time to time. Of late it seems to ride in tandem with the last name misspelling in an all-or-nothing proposition. I had a trifecta going when I was at BU as a work-study not only spelled my name wrong, but screwed up my job title as well. He was not our best work-study.

Odder still is that one office on campus here went from spelling my name correctly to Marc Cohen at some point between semesters. Perhaps they've got someone new sending out reports, I don't know.

My other favorite are students who misspell my name in correspondence, even though my name is typed out on the letter they are responding to. Not as big at Babson, where most of my communication with students is by email, but at BU I'd say the student letters that screwed up my name outpaced those with the correct spelling something like 6 or 7 to 1. With that sort of thoroughness, it should not surprise you that most of these letters were related to judicial cases, and that the logic they contained usually mirrored the thought put into spelling.

Conclusion? None. Just felt like writing about this.