Ilan

 A few weekends ago I overheard two similar conversations.

In the first, an acquaintance was explaining how to pronounce his wife’s name: “Elana. EE-lana. Like ‘e-mail.’ ” In the second, a woman I had just met was describing how her three-year-old daughter, Elena, was adjusting to preschool: “ ‘No,’ she tells all her teachers. ‘It is e-LEH-na.’ ”

Now, don’t get me wrong. Our three-year-old Elena, as the bilingual daughter of two Mexican-Americans, undoubtedly bears the Spanish variant of Helen. Our Elana, meanwhile, who I know to be Jewish, probably bears an alternate transliteration of Ilana, the feminine form of Ilan, which means “tree” in Hebrew. (Elena Kagan, on the other hand, is almost certainly the bearer of the Russian Helen cognate; that she has a brother named Irving is indicative of the sorts of shifts that have taken place in the naming styles of American Jews in the past half-century.)

Nonetheless, these two incidents led me to reflect on how dearly some hold to the particular pronunciation of their names, and a how single vowel is enough to upend their sense of self. Again, don’t get me wrong—I understand that impulse, that need to dig in one’s heels, for indeed not a day goes by that I myself do not fall prey to a narcissism of small differences or have to say, “There is an aitch at the end,” or, “It is a palindrome.” Ilan should not be confused with élan. Milan, Spain, is not Milan, Ohio.

But what, I wonder, if it were?