For all those who like to spell Jonathan Kent's name with to o's, I'm going to keep insisting that his name is Jonathan!

Kent Farm - official database

Superman info - please note this:

Superman homepage - lists birthday of actor who played Jonathan Kent on Smallville (April 8)

This is from Wikipedia:

There are many other sites you may check out as well, for example sites which list the casts of LnC, Smallville and Superman the Movie.

I'm not kidding you! Clark's dad's name is Jonathan! Spelled with two a's!!!

Ann

Lol, Ann! And no H...

I had a friend named Jonathan in high school who HATED it when people used an o at the end...

Carol

I'm annoyed when some people can't spell the name Jonathan Kent either, so you're not alone!

Same here. Or when Luthor becomes a Luther... Or Jimmy suddenly is an Olson (correct: Olsen).

I'm still waiting for someone to misspell Ellen Lane as Allan, though.

I love it when "Lois" becomes "Louis" .

LOL that's never happened to me, but I noticed I tend to write out the name "Lois," whenever I'm referring to my friend, Lisa. I use the name Lois a lot and any L name gets me on auto-pilot. I use that name so much that a few weeks ago, my best friend almost addressed me as Lois. I told I wouldn't have minded at all.

Strange. I've never seen "Jonathan" spelled any other way besides this way. John is just the short version of Jonathan, though I've seen that alternatively spelled Jon.

When I was really young,Johnathan was my favorite name for a boy and along with Jesse was to be the name of one of my future sons. I also renamed my Raggedy Andy doll Johnathan. Yes, I thought there had to be an "H." Then I got older and maybe wiser and decided I prefered the no h version better. With an "O" does not look right to me.

Mona

I have to say that I've been happily oblivious to this problem until reading this thread. However, I also tend to be equally oblivious to grammatical errors and such in people's writing. I like to think it just shows my ability to see past any mistakes into the good within, but it's probably because I've been reading too much post-modernist literature.

Well, I constantly mistype Lois as "Losi". And I know I'm not the only one who has that particular problem.

For some reason, I often type Metropolis and Metroplois... Fortunately for me there's spellcheck

And, for years, instead of Murder, I would type Mulder. O.o (Granted that's not Lois and Clark related...)

I'd like to be Muldered.

I know my error prompted this post, so my apologies! Seriously, if you're going to write a fic, get the names straight. No excuse for that, none. I just wish I'd seen the link to the scripts before I made an even worse error in the second chapter. I should probably not even attempt to write another fic, I'm sure I'll just screw things up even more.

Bella - you're not the first and certainly won't be the last to misspell a name.

Don't let misspelled words keep you from writing fic - I daresay many of us would be out of 'work' if we did that!!

Carol [who has many times had to respell a word 17 different ways to get spell check to recognize it and spit out the right one and who has failed miserably more than once]

I don't often get names wrong, but for years I had a complete brain block over 'definitely'. Without fail, I'd spell it definately. I knew it was wrong, but I still did it.

I was editing a fan magazine at one point and one of the subscribers noted that her old schoolteacher would have thrown chalk at me by now if she'd continued to misspell it as often as I did.

A few weeks later, I apparently did it again because the next thing I knew I was picking up the mail and a shower of red powder covered me as I opened up one of the envelopes.

Took me ages to figure out she'd sent me a stick of chalk, which had - naturally - disintegrated in transit.

Mind you, it worked. I don't think I spelled definitely wrong since.

BTW, Carol is right, Bella.

LabRat

Indeed, Bellarata, it was not just you!! I have seen Jonathan's name misspelled many times by many people here, and it has been so weird to me because Jonathan is a commmon name to me - and yet, before I started frequenting these boards, I wasn't even aware that "Jonathon" was an accepted or even an existing spelling! It was as if I had visited a Star Trek site, where a number of people spelled William Shatner's name as "Williom" Shatner. Actually, "Jonathon" is probably weirder to me then "Williom" would be to most Americans, because as a Swede I can't help pronouncing "Jonathon" in Swedish - well, because Jonat(h)an is a popular Swedish name, too - and in Swedish, if you spell it with an o at the end, you will have to pronounce it with an o at the end! Seriously. The o changes the pronunciation of the name in Swedish, which makes the spelling with an o even weirder to me. To me it is as if you would spell Spock as Spack, which would certainly change the pronunciation. But I know now that Jonathon is a perfectly normal name in the United States, so it has been an educating experience for me!

Since I have been a Superman fan since 1968, I know that Jonathan's name is and always has been spelled with an a, so I decided to officially point it out. But again, Bellarata, it is most certainly not only you who spell the name with an o!

By the way, I decided to google "Jonathan Kent" and "Jonathon Kent", to see which spelling brought me the greatest number of hits. Would you believe that "Jonathon Kent" generated 1,380,000 hits, but "Jonathan Kent" only 453,000? Ah, but then I checked the spelling of the names that that the hits had taken me to. When I googled "Jonathan Kent", the first twenty hits referred to sites which all spelled Jonathan with an a at the end. But when I googled "Jonathon Kent", five of the first twenty hits referred to sites which spelled Jonathan with an a at the end. Another two of the sites mentioned both spellings. One of the sites introduced a person asking for advice to find a good boy's name for his sister's child. The new parents had been thinking of Jonathon Kent - with two o's - and most of those who replied seemed to think that Jonathon was a good name and the normal spelling, better than Jonathan. But one poster asked the new parents to stay away from trendy spellings, by which he or she probably meant that "Jonathon" was the trendy new spelling and Jonathan was the "normal" one. I can certainly believe that Jonathon is trendy, since it seems to pop up everywhere in the United States these days, even though I wasn't even aware of the existence of that spelling until I found it on this site.

Ann

Jonathan's name is not the only one misspelt in fanfic or on websites. I've also seen:

Lex Luther
Schuster's Field
Jimmy Olson

I'm sure there are others that I can't think of right now. It happens...

Kathy

This post answered one of my long unanswered questions! For years I've seen Jonathan spelled with three 'a' or with two 'o' and also Olsen with two 'o' but I wasn't sure if there was a correct way of spelling or if there was some sort of anarchy in the names of the characters.

oh, and off topic:

My native language isn't english and I'm very prone to mistakes. That word is one of those I always mispell. I usually write definitively instead of definitely. It's just closer to the way it's said at home (definitivamente)

Stupid question, but what's wrong with Schuster's Field?

Yeah, I second that. That's how I always thought it was spelled... does anyone know the correct spelling from say, the comic books, or wherever?

His name was apparently Joe Shuster.

Ann

Big, fat 'OOOOPS'.

And from the archive:

Frequently Mis-Spelled Character Names


Luthor, not Luther
Olsen, not Olson
Klein, not Kline
Jonathan, not Jonathon
Deter, not Dieter


I work with a guy who really wants to confuse the 'Jonathan' issue. He spells it Johnathen.

With regard to Lois...

Being from the St. Louis area, It is soo hard to teach our girls about the Louis and Clark without saying Lois and Clark.

It's even harder when we point to the signs along the road and try and say it off-the-cuff. :rolleyes:

I personally have a problem with Klien vs. Klein when I am typing out the name...

James

James, I assume you're referring to "Lewis and Clark," who explored the Louisiana Purchase for President Thomas Jefferson in 1804-1805. But I know what you mean. I see one and the other phrase (and the associated people) jump into my head.

Hey, we live near Vancouver WA and when Lois & Clark was on, my son (aged 10 at the time) always called it Lewis & Clark.

I have a close friend with the last name Kline. But I read so much fanfic and Bernie baby is often in it, that I type her name Klein, often on official documents.
American's don't have as many specific ways to say "o" as the Scandinavians. To us Jonathan, Jonathon and Johnathon would all sound the same. When I was on a tour of Norway our guide try to tell us how to say the different "o"s, but my ear simply couldn't differentiate them. I guess it is something you have to learn in infancy.

Artemis