So a few days ago, somewhere on the internet (I'm simply too lazy to go find where) someone commented on a journal post that Ayn Rand was being pretentious for spelling her name with a "y" in the middle, like she was some kind of Mary-Sue named Krystyna.

I will call her "Ann" until my dying day, because it's a real name (and because I have a mental block against using the correct one), and it annoys the snot out of me when pretentious college boys correct me all the time. I mean, even she admits that she sort of made it up! In a letter to a fan in 1937, she said this, "Your letter inquiring about the origin of my name has been forwarded to me. In answer to your question, I must say that 'Ayn' is both a real name and an invention. The original of it is a Finnish feminine name.... Its pronunciation, spelled phonetically, would be: 'I-na.' I do not know what its correct spelling should be in English, but I chose to make it 'Ayn,' eliminating the final 'a.' I pronounce it as the letter 'I' with an 'n' added to it." And her birth name? Was Alisa. What's wrong with that? I can pronounce that correctly!