By

S.J Asher

Daily writing prompt

Write about your first name: its meaning, significance, etymology, etc.

View all responses

I hated my name at first.

Not because it was hard to pronounce – though it was – but because it felt random.

My older sister had already claimed one grandmother’s name, and our other grandmother’s name wasn’t even an option due to cultural traditions I wouldn’t understand until many years later.

So there I was, named after… weather?

My name, Snejana (Снежана in Cyrillic), emerges from deep Slavic roots. “Sneg” (снег) means snow in Slavic languages, weaving through Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, and Ukrainian.

In Bulgarian folklore, my name shares roots with Снежанка (Snezhanka) – yes, that’s Snow White to English speakers.

Moving to the US added a whole new layer to my name story. “Could you spell that?” became my daily soundtrack. “S-N-E-J-A-N-A,” I’d recite, watching people’s pens hover uncertainly over forms. “Like ‘sneeze’ without the ‘ze’, then the ‘j’ sounds like the ‘zh’ in ‘treasure’, and add ‘ana’,” I’d explain, having perfected this little speech through years of practice. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t – my name shape-shifted through emails, meeting invites, and company directories. Somewhere out there, there’s even a graduate school paper published under a misspelled version of my name because my supervisor never quite got it right.

These days, when I write, I choose to use S.J. – a deliberate boundary between worlds. My engineering career belongs to Snejana, with all its pronunciation guides and spelling corrections, while my writing finds freedom in those two simple initials.