Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
Ho boy. Time for ethnic-doppleganger Dora.
horsefish:
I had a coworker with the last name Gunsallus. People always wanted to spell it Gonzalez.
Akima:
It's natural that people should get unfamiliar names wrong. Once or maybe twice. But if they continue to get it wrong after you've told them what your name is, how it is pronounced, and how it is spelled, it comes down to their motivation. The person continually getting your name wrong is essentially saying: "I am an aristocrat; you are a serf. I will treat you however the hell I like, and you should just put up with it."
I once worked at a place where people mispronounced my surname*, even after I'd corrected them, and I put up with it. Then we got a new boss, with a real tongue-twister surname. Miraculously, the same people who'd apparently found it impossible to say my name correctly very quickly mastered his. Because he was the boss, and pissing him off would have real consequences. So I realised that it was a matter of motivation, and people's perceptions of social power.
Similarly, I had a co-worker who insisted on attaching a diminutive ending to my adopted Western-style first name. He did not do this with any of my male colleagues. I asked him privately to stop, but he didn't, so I started using a diminutive form of his name at every opportunity. He really didn't like that, and quickly I trained him to use my correct name. But he still felt that somehow I had treated him unfairly.
*I don't expect English-speakers to get my name exactly right, incidentally. Just to use the approximation, using normal English sounds, that I request.
TheEvilDog:
It happens to everyone at one stage or another. Where I live, and where I grew up, my surname is extremely rare, in another part it's a different matter, and also a different point. The problem is, is that a lot of people misspell it, a lot. The worst ones are my bills, even though I have on several occassions spelled out my surname to the customer services department, in a loud, clear manner, I will still recieve a bill with my surname spelled incorrectly. Yeah, it might seem funny, but I have on two occassions recieved, shall we say, threatening letters from my old phoneline provider, saying I hadn't paid my bills for three months, all because they had my name spelled incorrectly. After proving the first time that I had paid my bills, I chalked it up to a simple mistake, and they promised to fix it. Naturally, the second time proved they hadn't and I was threatened with having my phoneline cut, so I switched.
Like I said, it might seem funny, but it can be a problem for some people. For me, it was just one letter being changed for another and another being added onto the end, thats not much. But yes, I will agree with Akima on the point that if someone keeps making the same mistake, despite the fact that you have told them several times the proper way to pronounce it, then yes, they are being disrespectful, and they themselves should be treated the same way.
jwhouk:
You'd think that a name with four letters would be easy to pronounce. Ha.
horsefish:
Does it rhyme with "poke?"
My last name is Kurz - another four lettters people have trouble with. I've had it both misspelled and mispronounced as Kurtz, Kruz, Cruz, Coors, and Curtis.
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