Hollie

[cosmolinguist]

I can understand belief in gods, the subjectivity of attraction, the apppeal of stuff I don't like. I understand the influence the yogh has had on English orthography and I understand why atonal music makes people feel unsettled. I even understood once, for a whole afternoon, Cantor's Diagonal Proof.

But I cannot understand how often e-mails from me, with my name in the "from" field and my name at the bottom of the e-mail (and, in many cases, my name in the e-mail address itself) elicit replies addressed to "Hollie." Once or twice I could forgive. Even from someone who's known me for years -- because that person regularly called Jennie "Jenny" too. But this is happening a lot. From different people. Who often get it right at first or in between instances of wrongness, so it's not as if they're hopeless causes.

I can't even tell if I really hate the -ie spelling of my name for itself (but I think I do, ugh) or if I just hate the lack of attention it represents.

Comments

[magister]

What I always get which winds me up is my surname being mispronounced. I think it's the lack on attention if I've told someone the correct pronunciation and they still get it wrong.

[cosmolinguist]

I must say, any name with "ough" always put the fear into me when I had to ring people up to ask them stuff. But I was fine once I knew one; I learned what to expect and learned the conventions of pronouncing them. And certainly if someone told me how to say their name I was fine. It's just that there's no way to tell ahead of time, if it's an unfamiliar name. :)

Oddly my completely useless surname, that no one can spell or say, doesn't bother me at all. Maybe I'm just more used to it being difficult? I don't know. But I don't even bother to correct people, so people who've known me long or well, and even some people who pride themselves on getting it right, usually get it wrong.

My dad says there's another branch of his family that pronounces it the way most people first guess, and I wonder if they started doing that just so they wouldn't have to correct people so much. :) (But then maybe theirs was first, maybe they are correct and we're the ones doing it wrong. It definitely seems that way! But why invent such a perversity?)

[magister]

Quite so. I figure that the thing to do is to ask and to remember any corrections you're given.

Anyone who still mispronounced it after I've told them, I feel like I have licence to be cranky.

[cosmolinguist]

Oh yes. I realize that I ended up wittering away about my own stuff and didn't sound as sympathetic to your plight as I meant to be. People's inability to regurgitate information just provided to them is disheartening and makes me cranky, too.

[magister]

Oh, not at all. I suspect I did much the same myself.

[sfred]

Now I suspect I pronounce your surname wrongly, because I've never been told either way. Email me a pronunciation guide?

I get annoyed with people putting an extra R in my first name and an extra D in my surname - the latter is because a friend of a friend has a similar surname but with an extra D.

[magister]

Well, it's Brough pronounced like rough with an additional B. And there's no way of knowing that to look at it - it could rhyme with bough or through or though. On the other hand, once you've said to someone "It's pronounced Bruff" and been told "Yes, Mr Brow" it does get wearing.

I have to say, given all the above alternatives, I still don't see how anyone can reasonably conclude I'm called Mr Bugger.

[sfred]

Sorry, I meant Holly - although this is interesting too.

Having grown up in a village where every other person's surname was Clough ("cluff"), I'd have made the right assumption about your surname, if I'd known what it was. :-)

[miss_s_b]

I'm having great fun thinking up new and exciting ways of mispronouncing him this morning though ;)

[sfred]

*likes*

Tangentially - I have a friend whose last name is 'Clow' - and I have trouble not autocorrecting that in my brain to pronounce it 'Clough', because of how it works the other way round.

[rmc28]

I will give you a solidarity-fist-bump for all the people who read emails from me and/or correct web forms I have submitted to add a hyphen that doesn't exist, or ignore the first half of my surname altogether.

And then there's the inlaws that think I'm Mrs Tony Finch *spit*

[cosmolinguist]

Oh man. It took me a whole year after we got married to convince my own family to stop addressing stuff to us as "Mr. & Mrs. Hickey." You'd think my mom would've been pleased that I kept the name I share with my parents, but it just isn't the Done Thing to keep one's "maiden" name (or, as I like to think of it, my name).

(I don't like being called "Mrs" either, speaking of them getting my name wrong. But titles are pretty irrelevant to me: I can't get my GP surgery to stop calling me "Miss" and once Andrew bought me a plane ticket for Mr. Holly (he'd apparently never noticed the drop-down box in web forms asking for a title, since the default is always the one he wants). I think (compulsory) titles are a stupid thing, but that's a rant for another day.)

[andrewhickey.info]

No, that was a site-functionality problem. I've always been aware of the drop-down boxes, and remember being very annoyed on your behalf in 2007 or so when KLM's one *only* gave Mr, Mrs or Miss as options with no Ms...

[cosmolinguist]

Sorry to malign you there, then. :) x

[miss_s_b]

whereas, just to complicate things, and for reasons I'm not quite sure of, I DETEST Ms.

[cosmolinguist]

It sounds ugly and looks silly. I can see how a person could hate it. I don't like it for itself, I use it because "Mrs." with my surname is my mom's name and I don't want it. :)

But also I don't think my marital status should be so obvious to the world when men's isn't. And that leaves me with either Ms. or becoming a Dr.!

[miss_s_b]

I've been thinking about this since we talked and I actually realised I put quite a lot of effort into getting people not to use any honorific at all, but to just call me Jennie.

(interestingly my phone just tried to correct honorific to homoerotic. This has caused much amusement in this house ;))

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah I'm all for that. One of the things I like about Quakers is that they discourage the use of all honorific titles.

[cosmolinguist]

My phone doesn't do autocorrect but it does suggest stuff as I type and I'm always amused that it thinks I type "Jura" more than "just" and thinks I'll want "fuck's" more than anything else that starts with "fu", like "fun" or "further" or "future" or useful words like that. So I can hardly laugh at what other people's phones think of them. :)

[land-girl.livejournal.com]

97% of the time people spell my name 'Ellie' rather than 'Elly'. I have to say, I don't care a bit. I understand that the lack of attention could be hurtful, but I seem to be immune.

[cosmolinguist]

I don't mind if people have only heard it -- usually I think I benefit from having the "standard" version of my name, like Jenny or Ellie, so this is a rare and interesting thing -- it's just when "Holly" is three different places on their computer screen and they still blithely type "Hollie" that my mind boggles.

[land-girl.livejournal.com]

It's bizarre. Perhaps some people don't see everything when they read?

[cosmolinguist]

I'm sure I don't (my poor eyesight means I'm always "cheating" by guessing at the shapes of letters/words that I read), so it's probably hypocritical of me to care about this in others. :)

[taimatsu]

My workplace lists internal email addresses in Outlook surname first, so I am Kennedy Lucy TEAM NAME. This sucks for people whose surname is a common first name, e.g. Graham or James. We had a series of complaints on the internal letters page about this a while back, and proposals to form a club of people misnamed all the time.

I'm now checking email for a colleague who has moved to a different role, who keeps getting addressed as Mark although his surname is actually Marks and his first name is entirely different. It's not like people don't KNOW the surname is listed first! I do think people don't read properly a lot of the time.

[cosmolinguist]

t's not like people don't KNOW the surname is listed first!

Yeah, this is what I find bizarre: people failing even when they know how the system works.

I'd get so annoyed at being called James or Mark. :) Of course it probably doesn't help that the surnames-as-first-names are usually men's first names (...though this is changing a lot in America, where kids all seem to be named Madison or Taylor or Bailey or Riley, it's all so bizarre. My mom's best friend has grandchildren named Cole, Addison and Kenadee. The more I hear about things like this, the more old-fashioned and judgmental I feel about names for babies :) ).

[innerbrat]

I used to hate "Debbie," and let's be honest, I still do. But idk, I let that go when I realized I do it a lot with people when words go from my composing-sentence-brain to my fingers without stopping at 'how do I spell this' brain, because that slows down the writing process too much.

I spent many months calling Marian, my grad school advisor, "Marion" until I realized my mistake. Now I assume people just aren't really engaging part of their brain, not that they just don't care enough about me to realize I care about the spelling of my name.

That said, no one is called Hollie.

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, I hate "Hollie" but I don't hate the people who use it. It's not a huge problem for me (it just makes me glad I got the proper spelling of my name :) ), it's just baffling.

I don't think the "how do I spell this" part of my brain is distinct from the "composing things" part of my brain (and my writing process is probably always slow because of it!) so this is an interesting new thing to think about.

[kickthehobbit.livejournal.com]

I am a Jennie that gets misspelled as Jenny. I understand your gripe perfectly. It's especially bad now that I'm an adult and to be easy on everyone I go by Jenn (and don't mind if it's only spelt with one n)—I sign e-mails "Sincerely, Jenn" and get something back going, "Dear Jenny..."

Blithe lack of concern, indeed.

[cosmolinguist]

One of my best friends in college was a Jenn, but definitely not a Jennie (or Jenny or Jenni or any spelling of that sound), and it drove her crazy the way people would reply to her just as you describe here. It happened a lot.

[australian-joe.livejournal.com]

I get a lot of emails to "Jo". I likewise cannot process it as anything other than lack of attention, and indeed, the people who do it the most show the same lack of attention in everything else they do in the workplace.

I now consciously double-check I've got someone's name right if I haven't emailed them 100 times already, or if it's been more than a month without my writing them any email. It probably costs me a WHOLE FIVE SECONDS.

[starbrow.livejournal.com]

For me, people get my name right in email but often wrong in person - they start calling me Liz or Lizzie, which is just So. Very. Wrong. I can't even.

I just can't fathom paying so little attention to detail in general! In the height of BiCon organising madness, I accidentally addressed an email to Natalya that started off "Hi Nat" because at the time I was thinking about someone else whose name really was Nat. I noticed it about a minute after I sent the email and immediately wrote back with an apology. That's what I would expect if someone called me the wrong name, but somehow it never seems to happen.

I guess people just aren't thinking, or have never considered what is referred to as the Platinum Rule, which is "treat others as they wish to be treated". For general social interactions, this one's pretty much a winner.

[cosmolinguist]

they start calling me Liz or Lizzie, which is just So. Very. Wrong. I can't even.

It is! I don't know who Liz and Lizzie are, but they're definitely not you!

I've never understood this tendency to shorten people's names for them. Andrew always introduces himself as Andrew, but there's a group of people, mostly who were friends of his before I knew him, who call him Andy, which confuses me to no end. I just cannot imagine the person I know as "Andrew" being an "Andy," in the same way you are not Liz.

Similarly my mom called one of my first boyfriends Matt when a) I, and he himself, always called him Matthew! and b) I knew about a million other Matts so when she said this I'd wonder which of them she meant, but never think of Matthew.

It is disrespectful not to call people the name they tell you they're called. I really feel for friends of mine who've changed their name for whatever reason and have to put up with resistance to that. But clearly there's a ton of incompetence here, quite apart from any malice.

[starbrow.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there's a whole "don't necessarily attribute to malice that which can be reasonably explained by incompetence" thing. I think in most cases it is just sheer incompetence/not thinking, but in some cases it's an attempt to control their interaction with you, to have it on their own terms. This is definitely the sense I tend to get when people call me Liz and what was probably happening when your mother referred to your boyfriend as Matt.

[cosmolinguist]

I'm sure that's what she was doing, come to think of it. She always hated him. :)