vicariously annoyed

[fox]

Himself and the prince's last name (I didn't change mine) has a pronunciation that is not immediately obvious to most people in our area. This week and next, the prince is at a day camp where pickup happens in a drive-through situation; I put a printout on the dashboard with his name on it, and a teenager with a walkie-talkie calls and asks the people inside to bring him out. On Monday, the first young person to do this paused after the first name and then got the surname badly wrong. I helpfully said it for him; he ignored me and repeated the mispronunciation; and when he went away I got a pen out of my bag and wrote a phonetic version, impossible to mispronounce, next to the printed version. A couple minutes later a second young person who didn't know her colleague had already come by looked at my dashboard and called for my kid pronouncing his name correctly. Awesome.

Yesterday, the first young person was on pickup duty again, and he looked at the printout WITH THE PHONETIC SPELLING and read off the mispronunciation into his walkie-talkie. It's not even my name and I'm so annoyed by this. Which is funny, because "Mrs. ThatName" is also not my name, and it doesn't bother me one bit when people assume it is; it doesn't even bother me when people keep sending mail to me by that name after they've asked me whether I use it and I've told them I don't. I don't know why that doesn't bother me, but it doesn't. But this callow youth pronouncing it wrong when I've made two separate attempts to provide the right pronunciation? I'm unreasonably irked. :-P

Himself says he spent most of his childhood and young adulthood being seriously irked when people got his name wrong. We explained to the kid at dinnertime that people might pronounce his name in unexpected ways, and he just found it hilarious. I have to go pick him up in a little less than an hour, and I'm this close to crossing out the non-phonetic spelling so the only thing the boy in the pickup lane can read will be the thing he can't possibly flub. But I worry that he'd find a way and then I'd be even madder.

Comments

[emrinalexander]

My last name growing up was "Loser" pronounced with a long o, not oo. Oh the fun growing up, so boy do i empathize.

[fox]

I read this comment out loud to Himself, who of course didn't need me to go beyond pronouncing your original last name (i.e., didn't need me to spell it) before he flinched and said how sorry he was. Oof.

[meara]

I still remember graduation. When we were told to write how to pronounce our names. So I wrote Shay-na. I got announced as “ShaNAY” lol

[fox]

Some of us from my chorus did a thing a few years ago where there was an MC from the radio, smooth voice, career in communications, no problem. They'd spelled things phonetically so she could easily read them off the page without stumbling—like, don't write them twice because a person reading doesn't know the parentheses are coming until after they've read the thing that's not in parentheses, right? Just do it phonetically once and go. Which was great until she went to announce the next piece by composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, which because many or most Americans are unaccustomed to the old British pronunciation of that name they'd written as "Rafe," and she said "Raffay." /o\ (Would it have been better to write it as "Raif," or would she have pronounced that "Rayif"? I think the answer is, write things phonetically and go over the text with the speaker beforehand.)

[tigerflower]

My spouse's dyslexia makes pronunciations, even of things written out phonetically, a crapshoot. Once he gets a pronunciation stuck in his head, to make matters worse, it's stuck for good.

Thus at our house we have a bottle of "Doctor Brummer's" castile soap in our bathroom and sometimes cook in a cast-iron pot made by "Le Croissant," and every once in a while I bake "painful chocolate" which are also referred to as "chocolate rolls" for convenience's sake.

[fox]

1. Hey! Hi! ♥

2. Fair enough, but this young person can't possibly be familiar enough yet with my family members' surname for his pronunciation of it to have calcified. He's seen it a total of three times, in amongst hundreds or thousands of other names, two of which times he's had to ignore the phonetic option (begins with a J) to go for the correctly spelled option (begins with a G, which Kids These Days aren't being taught is pronounced differently based on the vowel that comes next, apparently?).

Some of my annoyance is at the fifteen-year-old of it all, a white kid in a red hat (it's a hat representing That Local Sports Team, not one of those red hats, but one does have a visceral response) pulled down low over his eyes. It's a type I didn't respond well to when I was a white teenager, and I know I'm going to have to continue to work hard to keep any negative response invisible as my kid and those of his friends who have similar complexions and circumstances grow up to be white teenagers. But some of it is at the overwhelming appearance that no effort whatsoever is being made. . . . I am keeping it to myself. The same boy did in fact read the name wrong yesterday, for the third time, and I didn't flinch or roll my eyes or anything. I sighed inwardly and waited for my kid to come outside. :-)

3. I thought waaay too hard in #2 about where best to put the word "yet."

[tigerflower]

Oh no, no. White boy in baseball hat pulled down too low over his eyes?

No. Zero tolerance. Scorched earth.

And yes, that is my own experience of high school talking. Unrepentantly so.