Who the fuck thought it was a brilliant idea to just hand her the phonetics without their actual name? I feel so bad for her, and it's honestly not her fault.

I would have literally announced it in the booth. “Apologues students, but whoever typed this list for me misspelled all your names.”

My college had a great system. Right before walking the stage, you would say your name into a closed loop mic that only the presenter could hear. He would then immediately repeat what you said into the mic for the auditorium to hear as you walked onto the stage. This eliminated issues with reading the names or memorizing anything. You could also give him preferred names and middle names if you wanted.

“zoobat pale” is a wild Pokémon

I can't believe they gave her a phonetic spelling list. Reading phonetic names quickly, back to back and on the spot would be the worst thing ever.

Never once has Thomas had his name mispronounced before until now

I graduated last year and they forgot my diploma. Literally. They were calling up each graduate for English philology (my major) and i was waiting for my name and suddenly they were like "and now Spanish philology ". Luckily our professor was handing them out and she saw how confused I was and came to me. She got pissed, went downstairs for a bit and came back with my diploma. I tend to say that they left the best for last. ✨️✨️

"Where do you work?" "I work at TA MU MAY - JAY FA FUSO University"

This has to have felt like some kind of nightmare for this woman. I can't imagine being given a card with phonetic spelling without foreknowledge. What a blunder, man.

Not being able to say “Thomas” while also being at “Thomas Jefferson” is diabolical 😂

They should make the list public so we can try at home like a fun little game.

She read that shit like she was trying to say a legend of Zelda shrine out loud

This is literally that key and Peele bit

A list of graduates, entirely in phonetics, is wild. Whoever gave that to her is the epitome of incompetent.

My friends last name is Geissler, and when she graduated the ceremony guy pronounced it “Gay-Slur” with a pause between both syllables and everything.

She seems to be (sometimes) combining the first name with the first syllable of the next name. Hence, Marissa Lynn = Marisilin Allison Nicole = Allisuna Cole Also seems like the card sometimes represents the schwa as a u or uh, which she then pronounces 'oo' So we get Allison Nicole = Allisoona Cole (not sure why the 'Ni' becomes 'na'... maybe the Ni is represented as 'Nacole') Stephanie = Stephoonie Jessica = Jessikoo Thomas = Ta moo may (although I don't know why it didn't end up as Tamoos)

For those that don’t know. The IPA transcription of Thomas looks like /tɔməs/ Edit: I didn’t realize they meant they broke it down by syllable pronunciation not phonetic transcriptions, welcome to IPA tho

Imagine showing up to a reading competition and your opponent suggests the names are only written in phonetics.

The fact that she had the phonetic spelling AND the regular spelling is what gets me. A graduate from the school posted a picture of it and it has both spellings. You would of thought she would of started reading the regular spelling but I guess not lmao

Wait the name of the uni is Thomas Jefferson? “Where do you work?” “Tom-moo-may university”

Where's A-Aaron at !?

Taumoohmay will surely remember this forever.

My college graduation memory: In a field house where the A/C couldn’t keep up with the heat and amount of people. Some dude 15 mins into the 2-3 hour ceremony starts letting it rip and gassing the whole section. People playing detective trying to figure out who the hell is farting based on dissipation.

8:09 not the lady being absorbed into the window in the advert 😭

Ruined my graduation by just not graduating.

"Dude your name's Thomas, no way anyone would mispronounce that" "Well, actually..."

The cards she was given had their actual names AS WELL as the phonetic spelling though

This is what my dad sounded like when he was having his stroke

That was a straight set up mission the school did to that lady lmao

I was so confused how she was struggling so much. I then looked up what phonetic spelling was. I myself would struggle 100x more pronouncing a name I know in phonetics than a name I’ve never seen just spelled out.

When I graduated highschool I was sick at the time but I was powering through it (pre covid times obvi) but someone was giving a speech and we had to stand for it for whatever reason and I nearly passed out I ended up laying on the cool pavement back stage and then I got in a wheelchair and shoehorned on stage and got the wrong diploma. I'll never forget it at least

charlie's description of graduating at 3:40 is disturbingly accurate to my own lmfao

What's your Fantasy Name: Step 1) Have your name Step 2) Have this lady say it out loud

My university had a very good system for this. The presenter had the list of names ahead of time and had marked evey one she was not 100% confident in. If your name got marked you were directed to go see the presenter at a table in the corner. You were also encouraged to go talk to the presenter if you had what may look like a normal name but was pronounced differently. The presenter herself had you pronounce your name to her several times, she would take notes and then one of the people helping her would record a clip of you saying it. My guess is, if the presenter's notes were not enough to jog her memory on how to pronounce it, there was someone right beside her to queue up the recording for her to give a quick listen. All in all it was very well thought out and precisely executed. One of the few things my university actually did right.

I was once the escort at a quinceanera, and when the announcer called me up to start the dance ceremony he called me "Carmen". Still plagues me to this day.

i wonder how many ppl got a lifelong nickname through that

The issue is the phonetic list probably didn't distinguish the end of one name and the beginning of a middle or surname. Which is why they was added syllables at the end of the name.

This lady is gonna start summoning demons with these pronunciations

The pronunciation debacle at the graduation will definitely make it more memorable for everyone. It's unfortunate for the students, but at least there's a unique story to tell.

doing gods work by giving all those easy to say names a taste of what us hard names have to go through

They basically just made her play Mad Gab instead of just giving her names

Imagine going through all that work and graduating and it ends with them just butchering the shit out of your name

That school set that poor lady up to look as dumb as possible. I feel bad for her

Here’s the thing tho. Phonetic spelling is important and my graduation had all the English professors spell our names phonetically if they are hard to pronounce. I have four names and my last name is hyphenated and very complicated Italian. BUT they had another English teacher VERSED in phonetic spellings do the announcing of every grad. And she came by and rehearsed them if we had had them spell it out

I love that the broadcast let her announce the name and then reveal what it actually was

The world is back to normal. Charlie is back in a white shirt.

Any Giants fans here who remember when they had that kid as a guest PA announcer who introduced Russ Davis as "Roos" Davis? I love how we collectively decided to run with it and started cheering him on with "ROOOOOOOS!!" from that point forward until he retired. 😂

My graduation for high school was so sad. Nobody was cheering for me at all, it's was dead silent for 5 seconds, and then the pity cheer came in to stop the awkward silent.

My university made us put our pheotic name in our submission to walk, they then showed the graduation card to us on our day of graduation that had our spelled out name and pheotic spelling to confirm they got both right. How did the school mess up that bad by not going something that easy

6:54 As a Speech-Pathology major, I can confirm that some of these phonetics are not easy for someone who isn't experienced to read. Like in jessica for example, the whole name would be transcribed as this /dʒɛsɪkə/. How would the school expect someone without some sort of linguistics or phonology background to read these accurately and quickly? That being said, she is still adding extra sounds that are not present in the transcription and this would be my personal hell if I had to rapid fire read names like that. End rant

All that I got for my college graduation was a virtual one due to the 2020 pandemic. I would've taken this over the virtual one because it would've been more memorable and something to look back on fondly. I do have a bit of a complicated last name, but i don't mind if someone messed it up. I hope those college graduates have amazing careers.

I went to this school for a semester and transferred out. I can confidently say that this video is the perfect representation about how everything at TJU went.

Charlie is right. They will remember this forever. During my eight grade graduation, I put my wrote my middle name on the call sheet as “Danger”, but I didn’t bother with phonetic spelling because…I live dangerously. The announcer pronounced my middle name as “Dang- er” and my family still brings it up to this day

6:43 She gets "Alisoona" because there's also no separation between names. So her middle name, Nicole, the "Ni" is blending in to the end of "Allison". That's also why she says "Cole" next, "Alisoona Cole" from "Allison Nicole".

Why would a university just expect a person couldnt read, so they hand them cards with a bunch of stupid shit written to hope a person could pronounce what they wrote?

I like that you look into the actual context behind the situation instead of just reporting it

Critical mentioning my graduation feels like a fever dream lmao

Honestly this is so much better than a regular graduation now your graduation is famous for being the funniest in history lmao

Having the phonetics of the names only is like assembling a puzzle without the original picture. I feel bad for the presentor and i ridicule the school for thinking a phonetic only list was how they should have handled it.

Me when the teacher tells me to read at loud in class

As someone who's graduating high school this Sunday, I felt a mix of emotions watching this video.

0:21 Thomas is literally in the name of the University…

soooo glad my shcool had an acting professor who was also a speech coach announce the names. he nailed ALL of them

There's still got to be more to this story. The phonetic spelling of Thomas is not Tuhmoomay. And the phonetic spelling of Elizabeth is not Lee.

I thought it might have been some elaborate final test for the nursing students - see if any of them checked if she was having a stroke or similar.

Imagine getting ready to read students name out loud and the paper they give you looks like this; - /dʒɑn/ - /ˈmɛri/ - /ˈmaɪkəl/ - /ˈdʒɛnɪfər/ - /dʒeɪmz/ - /ˈsɛrə/ - /ˈdeɪvɪd/ - /ˈɛməli/ - /ˈkrɪstəfər/ - /ˈdʒɛsɪkə/

At my graduation they not only mispronounced my name but also got it mixed up with another student, so some random kid was called my mispronounced name

NOT ONLY is this the former high school class of 2020 finally getting to have a graduation, they also CHOSE to study nursing DURING THE PANDEMIC.

"Balakay? Where is Balakay at?" "My name's Blake..." "Are you out of your goddamn mind?"

The most ironic part of this is that this is from Ta-moo-may Jefferson University.

As someone with a simple last name that EVERYONE gets wrong, i feel the pain. I was livid during my graduation, my mother even got a picture with my face scrunched in anger walking across the stage.

I was in the crowd for this. My sister was graduating for nursing. Let me just say, the crowd was not quiet. It was utterly baffling how bad she was fumbling. The amount of times she had messed up just the name Elizabeth is insane! Me and many others in the crowd were periodically yelling to stop or swap with someone else. One dude yelled “get it right”, and from there it ramped up and more people joined, it was wild! Luckily, when my sister went up, someone else was reading the names. Who knew this would happen, and for such a damn big event too! Oh, and as for the phonetic spelling: my sister said that one of her professors went up to point out to her to just say the names themselves, but she kept either ignoring him or not understanding what they meant, which is where the problem arises.

I would have been so concerned as a nursing student on this stage cause the way she pronounced Thomas actually sounds so much like someone starting slurring their speech right before a massive seizure... this hole thing is unbelievable 😭😭😭😭 Ps: I'm not a nursing student I just meant it as 'if I was'

She got Thomas wrong and she WORKS at Thomas Jefferson University...

Woman, EVEN THE NAME OF THE SCHOOL IS THOMAS, how hard could it possibly be?

You can really tell when someone commented in the first 0.6 seconds of the video cuz they are all insulting the way she says thomas when literally charlie explains why less than 3 minutes in

What’s with the graduation shit this year? The USC disaster, the Butker speech and now this

Honestly, the fact that nobody thought she was having a stroke is kinda terrifying,…

Sounds like the school pranked her by giving her the names spelled phonetically while sacrificing the graduates' pride lmao

EXACTLY the Key and Peele skit, I cannot believe this is real life lmaoooo Did she call any Blakes Balakay? Any Jaquellans?

Dude will forever be branded tahmoomay

In middle school, I was super involved with the spelling bee. I was one of those kids who studied for it and everything. In high school, I was an editor for a student magazine. In college, I majored in English. I still don’t know how to read phonetic spellings.

You see, "Tom-Muh-May??" is the name of those masks that give you extra lives in crash bandicoot

Not stopping is the thing that gets me 😂 Like just turn to your boss and be like “YO, WTF. REAL LIST, PLZ 🙏 THANKS”

as someone who graduated yesterday, this warms my heart

So, according to the card I saw on The Washinton Post, she had cards with the names spelled AND phonetically....and also, the phonetics were hard to mess up if you read them the way they were on the card. Sair-uh Vuhr-jin-ya Brehn-nun and you read out...“Sigh-eer Oo-voon-jean-june Bree-nun" girl...what?!

2:18 Oh no this is exactly how much respect the school has for its graduates.

my college graduation was right after the brunt of the pandemic ended, so it had no ceremony or party, it was just a handful of people in a line taking a bunch of pictures, but I went there with 0 intention of taking pictures and honestly didn't even know there were going to be pictures, so I wore some long jhorts and a pair of dirty sneakers, and now all have to remember that day are a bunch of wackass pictures of me looking like a homeless teen runaway junkie. I *wish* they were announcing names and the person doing it called me Quandale Dingle or something, that would've made the occasion actually worth smiling about

Dudes name was Thomas...The same first name of the damn school!!! 🤣🤣🤣 Unreal.

6:40 I don’t think they had spaces between first and last names. The “Allisoona” she says here was probably written with a soft u instead of an o, and she probably got the ending “na” from Nicole. With no spacing between words, there is no way to tell whether or not her name is Allison Nicole, or Allisoni Cole. I don’t think she’s trolling

5:23 from now on this is my username

I thought it was the White Woman struggling to pronounce some "ethnic" names but she is struggling with THOMAS 😂

I’m studying for my master’s degree in linguistics and frequently come across phonetic spellings and even I’d probably have issues reading those out loud correctly immediately

I’d be legitimately concerned she was having a stroke

Allison phonetics is wild there’s a few variations Al-li-son, AL-i-suhn, AEL-ih-SahN, or al-uh-suh n

Charlie. Please stop breaking into my house and trying to fucking kill me. This is the third time this week.

That’s insane. I’ve graduated twice now and both times the announcer was given both the normal name and a phonetic spelling submitted by the student only if they felt it was necessary. For example my name ends in a short I sound, and I submitted a phonetic spelling to ensure they didn’t pronounce my name with a long I sound. This seems to be standard for all schools. What was Jefferson thinking?

0:45 I always love when Charlie specifies to what he refers as to the point of making a sound like this, it always just stimulates my brain

1:50 my favorite youtuber zubat pale 🗣️🗣️🔥

THE FACT THAT SHE CANT PRONOUNCE THOMAS AND ITS THE NAME OF THE SCHOOL