In Todd we trust?

My name is Todd. Repeat after me: Tod-duh! It's not Tad. Or Tom. Or Scott. After all these years, you would think my name would be easier to recall. People get my name wrong with startling regularity. Amazing feat for a monosyllabic moniker.

Not only is Todd a name that is apparently hard to pronounce, it is also hard to spell. I have had many a phone rep ask me "Is that Todd with one d or two d's "? I reply, "3 d's ... it's pronounced todd-duh-duh." Awkward silence follows.

Todd is a name of Scottish origin. It derives from a word that means 'fox.' I've never been considered a fox in any metaphorical sense. I do, however, share the fox's trait of being an opportunistic carnivore. I try to honor my heritage.

Todd, as a household name, was a product of the Fifties. Unfortunately, I wasn't, so my mother had to wait a few years to unleash it. For many years I was the one and only Todd at my school.

I was joking with a woman at church about the pronounciation of her name. She cooly replied, "I assume you pronounce Todd with a 'DUH'?" It became a running joke. I ran into her at the pediatrician and her little girl whispered, "Mama, there's the man with the 'duh'!" I'm marked for life. Now whenever I'm caught making a stupid mistake, I retort, "Well, you can't say Todd without 'duh'."

Curiously enough, I was named after a woman. A friend of my mother named Sherry Todd predicted that I would be a male instead of the expected female. She told my mother, "If it's a boy name him after me." Had a chromosome been different I wouldn't have been named Todd. They might have named me Sherry. Maybe then someone would finally get it right.

One popular baby name book warns: "Todd is one of those names which is too young to be manly, too soft to be macho, too firm to be truly wimpy." Todd was also listed as being "so in it's out." What other name so defiantly straddles the sociological fence?

Another book exclaims, "Never name your kid Todd. It's too surfer-dude." Of all the images I've tried to cultivate, 'surfer-dude ' isn't one of them. Dugspur has been landlocked since before the Depression.

In the awful, 1983 remake of the beach flick "Where The Boys Are," there's a scene where some girls are walking past a group of surfer dudes at the beach. One girl yell, "Hey, Todd." The entire group of surfer dudes turn and wave. Her friend asks how she knew them. She replies, "All surfers are named Todd."

But familiarity fosters contempt. Comedian George Carlin once dissed my name when he asked, "Who names their kid Todd?" He further ranted on how much he hated that name. One wonders why. Maybe he got beat up by a surfer dude.