When you read, even silently, it's very annoying to have a name crop up that you can't pronounce. It's especially annoying if that name crops up a lot. Since this book is about the legendary (and completely mythical) Gheorgheni family, and since I know for a fact that everybody mispronounces it, I think I owe the reader some help here.

The name Gheorgheni comes from a town in the Carpathians which I, as a fifteen-year-old looking for an exotic Transylvanian name, stumbled across in an atlas. It must have been fate. At the time, I didn't know any Romanian, so I pronounced it to rhyme with something I did know: the nearby Allegheny River.

Hence what I regard as the 'western Pennsylvania' version: Gheorgheni, pronounced 'Gore-GAY-nee'.

I invented the Gheorghenis to entertain my friend Randy in junior high school. Randy's the guy who advised me solemnly, 'Read Dracula. It will change your life.'

He was right. I realised that in 1980 when I looked out of a bus window and was startled to see a sign announcing that we'd reached the town limits of. . . you guessed it: Gheorgheni. What was I doing there? Spending that Olympic summer studying Romanian language, literature and history at the University of Cluj-Napoca, because why not? The University of Cologne had offered me a scholarship and I'd jumped at the chance to see the place that had stirred my adolescent imagination. It turned out to be full of warm, kind people and a landscape not entirely unlike the one where I'd grown up. Great food, too.

Randy is also the one who rushed into school and breathlessly announced that we had to watch Dark Shadows. It, too, would change our lives. Again, he was right. (We sense a theme here.)

Once Randy found out I could write, he felt I owed it to him to keep him supplied with Gothic reading matter. Hence the Gheorghenis. Writing pastiches on 'it was a dark and stormy night' stuff turned out to be good practice. I learned to do research and to write paragraphs and dialogue and stuff. So thank you, Randy, wherever you are.

I'm so used to the Gheorgheni name by now that I take it for granted. After all, it is my name so much of the time that I'm more likely to answer to it than I am to the one I was given at birth. But it must be irritating to English speakers. It's hard on the eyes and probably rough on the mental ear.

I never thought about it until somebody in h2g2's audiovisual project read a poem of mine on a Youtube – and pronounced my name 'GEORGE-any'. Ouch, that hurt. So please adjust your inner ear to 'Gore-GAY-nee' if you can.

If you're a purist, go ahead and pronounce it the way the Romanians do. Which you certainly should if you're cheering for their renowned football team. (I've got the t-shirt.)

I just don't want to hear anything that sounds like 'George'. I don't even want you thinking it.

DG

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