On the L train last week there was a young woman who had earrings with a name spelled out in metal across a circle. When I looked at them for a few seconds I was quite surprised at the name's spelling: Regecca. Immediately I wondered if that was really her name, or if it was a mistake and her name was Rebecca. But if it was a mistake, why would she wear them? And if it wasn't a mistake, how the hell did she get earrings with that name on them? They looked like very typical, fake golden, stamped out, mass-produced earrings.

Googling produces 1,290 results, many of which are random lists of words or obvious misspellings like Regecca Romijn. One result is in the backstory of a character on a Dungeons & Dragons website. In the first 40 results there are 6 that appeared to be names of real people. There's also this doll named Regecca, which perhaps indicates that it was slightly less rare in Victorian Britain (now that I've repeated it to myself enough times it is starting to sound rather aristocratic). I wasn't able to find it in any national name databases; the ones I checked only include the 1000 most popular names.

So the most likely explanations I can see, in descending order of likelihood, are that a) the earrings were custom-made, despite not looking it... Well, that's really the only explanation I can imagine. The chance that they were either mass-produced on purpose or as a mistake but then still sold somewhere, and that this woman then obtained them either because they matched her name or despite the fact they didn't, seems vanishingly small. Any other possibilities?