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]

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 :) ).