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

[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. :)