start a victory garden and ration your IRRATIONALLY ANGRY feelings, part 3

people can't pronounce my last name. It is a bit of an unusual name, but it is short and pronounced exactly as it is spelled, and it gets mangled all the time.

I get that weird anxiety that maybe I have a speech impediment or can't pronounce my own name when people repeat it back incorrectly

people correct my pronunciation of my own last name. "oh, you mean x?" no i don't mean x. if i meant x i would say x.

saying "jim" is always interpreted as "gem"

Jim, Gem, Gym ... I guess it's good that we only talk here in letters.

i can't tolerate people who spell my first name wrong

I was given an odd name that I've legally regularized. No one could pronounce the old one correctly (including me, and evidently my parents as well). Long story, not worth it.

The IAness I wish to discuss instead is about strangers going to short forms without invitation and without asking. Not every Elizabeth wants to be called Liz. Not every Joseph is a Joe. Not every Patrick is a Pat. Not every Jennifer is a Jenny. People think they're being friendly and familiar but to my ear they're being rude.

If you switch around a few letters in my wife's name it contains a swear word-- I always wonder, when people made this mistake with it, if it ever crosses their minds that this can't be the correct spelling and maybe they should look at it again?

The IAness I wish to discuss instead is about strangers going to short forms without invitation and without asking.

Totally a legitimate complaint, but I've always wondered why.

I've got a friend named Matthew and GOD FORBID anyone slips up and calls him Matt. Then there are two other friends of mine, Clayton and Clay.

My name is Tre. Only way it could be shorter is if it was Re. I've always been secretly jealous of everyone with polysyllabic names who have dozens of variations. Even guys named Bob can be Bobby if they want. Wear a different name every day of the week.

hey tre tre

maybe with a hyphen, idk it's your name

your name is now.... T-Ray

YMP = Maurice Micklethwaite

YMP also = ragingly OTM about short forms of names

Yours, Not An Andy.

it drives me fucking nuts that americans don't know how to pronounce 'craig'

Wut

Assume you mean that it should rhyme with "vague" (approximately), as opposed to "leg"?

yep! fucking 'cregg' is bullshit grrrrrr

Also Graham

tru

Assume you mean that it should rhyme with "vague" (approximately), as opposed to "leg"?

Why would it rhyme with "leg"?

Because that's how we say it.

Rhymes with "Greg."

But I thought Americans were all about nobly trying to standardize English spelling and remove inconsistencies where possible? It's like my longstanding (intensely tedious, I can only apologize) bugbear about "Auld Lang Syne" and where/how/why/when the idea took hold that it was pronounced, "Auld Lang Zyne", I mean, why, wtf?

my name's pasta

i can't tolerate people who spell my first name wrong

― assawoman bay (harbl), Friday, 24 February 2017 00:21 (sixteen hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Lookit I don't wanna start a fight but we haven't even established that you pronounce it correctly so I mean

there is only one way to pronounce my name so that is not the problem. the problem is people who need to make all Cs Ks and all Is Ys and add Es to everything.

tom d powerfully otm

XP skilfully avoiding my cross examination imo!

C'mon, my fellow Americans, "ai" is a diphthong and it is not pronounced like "eh." I've always pronounced "Craig" to rhyme more or less with "vague." Is this a regional thing?

when you're typing an address into Google maps and the address you want autocompletes so you move to click on it and the damn address CHANGES right as you do that

C'mon, my fellow Americans, "ai" is a diphthong and it is not pronounced like "eh."

How do you pronounce the word "said"?

saw-yeed

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/7b/Sayidlost.PNG/250px-Sayidlost.PNG

the idea took hold that it was pronounced, "Auld Lang Zyne"

I'm no linguist, but I suspect this wasn't the result of an idea, but another example of Grimm's Law. The dipthong ng is voiced and it is simpler to follow it with a z than an s.

I'm no linguist either, is there another example where an S sound becomes a Z sound? Anyway it's Scots and no-one in Scotland says "Auld Lang Zyne".

is there another example where an S sound becomes a Z sound?

How do you pronounce the word "realise"?

At the start of a word.

.. or even, 'The dipthong ng is voiced and it is simpler to follow it with a z than an s.'

We need La Lechera to sort this for us.

Bread that is double-packaged, in a cellophane wrapper inside a plastic bag.

When I'm out somewhere with my two year old, say in a checkout line or at a park, and some dickhole adults come up behind us or next to us and have loud, profanity-laden conversations. Irrational because I'm sure I did this kind of thing once upon a time. But if I could press a button that made ice-pick shaped hailstones fall from the clouds and into their skulls...

we dial into our calls through our computer now using a special headset rather than phones. it's nice and convenient, but it makes your voice sound more clear and realistic than the phone does. which is cool and all, but like HD did to visuals, it amplifies noise that would normally not be heard.

there's this one guy who smacks his lips and clears his throat every call and on phones, I'd never notice it, but on these calls I can practically hear the mucus and saliva with great clarity and it's just gross. he can't possibly know he's doing it.

worst is that he adjusts his headset which is something everybody does and usually it doesn't make noise, but here it makes a disgusting rubbing sound, like ToeJam and Earl were getting freaky in a bathtub.

I keep wondering if I should tell him but it's not like he's doing it on purpose, it's just the technology makes it all crystal clear, including the gross stuff that used to be in the background

^at work, i mean

It's pretty common where I work for people to just ask "whoever's making noise" (we all know) to go on mute.

Oh i do that all the time. This guy is making the noise while he's presenting though. It is just that the headset and clear quality of the sound is picking up his excess lip smacking and throat clearing that his cell phone/desk phone never did

Weirdly he's the only one i notice it with though.

When I'm on a work conference call I need to remember to mute before I open a beer.

lol.

It's a la croix, I SWEAR.

the worst thing like that that ever happened to me was when I first became virtual and got my new laptop. for whatever reason, I guess the system was set up as such so that when I logged into WebEx the first time, it immediately flipped my camera on.

I'm the type of guy who likes to roll out of bed the way I am and work, as we don't do video conference calls. so I was shirtless. and we're in a meeting with like 30-50 people, and my web cam comes on, and shirtless me shows up in a small square on screen, capturing my head, my neck, and shoulders/top of my torso (no nipples, thankfully).

There was a 3-4 second delay between me seeing that on my screen and my project leader messaging me "your web cam is on", and I jumped beneath the table, then popped back up to where I could flip off the web cam but not appear in its line of vision.

omg