歇雲客居

You might think that you knew it already as I kept telling you in my blog, but you cannot fully trust your eyes. Oliva is not my daughter, but Olivia is.

When I found out that my little girl's name is spelt Oliva by her English teacher in kindergarten (yes, again), I just wanted to laugh it away. However, I still remember it after a week (though I always have poor memory), so I realize that the fact is that I don't know whether I should cry or laugh.

Cry? Because this is not the first time that such a simple name as Olivia is messed up. Laugh? Because Oliva, though not properly spelt, is pronounceable even by us Taiwanese (haha). In addition, without this "beautiful" mistake, I wouldn't have known that Oliva is a cigar brand, a jewellery company, and different restaurants in Hong Kong, New York, and Los Angeles. A town in Spain is named Oliva too!

I'm not opposed to Oliva as a name because I myself once had a name that was the same as some kind of Spanish wine. But the name Olivia means so much to me that I hate to see it altered. I also wonder why people take Oliva for granted when Olivia is much more popular as a name than Oliva.

In fact, what makes Oliva absolutely unacceptable to me is that when I first saw the word "Oliva", I thought of saliva... yuck!