Mom said no filly could say 'Amethyst' and that if Princess Celestia had ever been a foal, even she could not say it. There was no shame in me stumbling over a name I was meant to grow into. Her and Dad first called me Amy because it was trying to stick like dragon-sneeze's scent tickling a drake's throat. I was half-pegasus, and probably a few other things, too. Most ponies are. My little sister is, too. Growing into names wasn't a pegasus thing, but in the first few years, she tried to explain these things to me the best way she could. I was her Little Filly, her First Filly, and I was fawned over by them both.
That meant being given a name I could trip over. Unicorns like us had spectacular names, dad had always said, before I would ever know what that word meant. We're fit our names to our best ability. Or, that was how I think I remember him saying it. Some of his speeches and sayings aren't overturned in my mind as much as when I was a filly, but I remember him telling me that his father had told him, having been told by his father, that earth ponies liked a name they could find. Their names were to be worn like horseshoes. Which, I imagine, is why I have yet to meet an earth pony named Estrella or Winsome Wight. I may have been an eldest daughter by chance, but that didn't mean my father spared me this pseudo-truth, supposedly explaining why most pegasus ponies like my mother had names that were supposed to be as lively as flight.
None of this secondhoof storytelling stopped anypony from realizing that Amethyst Sparks just wasn't a name I fit into as a filly. Amy, my mother insisted, didn't have the zing that she saw in my eyes that reminded her of the stone my father named me for. She always was adamant that my father named me, or Amethyst Sparks would've have ended up on the first records of me.
I was a filly, and even if I had noticed the undercut of a feud lying in how they spoke about my own name, I wouldn't have cared. Mom had words like 'zing' and that was enough to light up my world. I begged her to explain 'zing' to me and what name had zing. She never had one answer, and certainly not one I understood entirely. Zing was why her eyes were different from everypony else's. Zing was why my father had an unusually dark coat and mane, or how he never smiled at his job despite being the happiest pony I knew. 'Zing' was why my mother never let me say my eyes were just purple, why my horn sparked every time I had a cold, and from the moment I could show it, my mother and father said I had a smile brighter than a sparkler.