My alter-ego is a caped woman who rides around on a broomstick dis-etiquettizing the world and pulling off the hairpieces of the likes of Dear Prudence and Miss Manners, and for the most part I think my alter-ego is a sensible woman. I call her Antietiquette. So what if your hosts ask you to take off your shoes when you come in the door, or if your kids aren't invited to a wedding, or if your dad is dating a new woman within a few months of your mother's death and the proper time period hasn't elapsed? Big fat deal. Grow up, I say.
But then there are pet peeves, and one of my greatest pet peeves is when parents spell their kids' names differently just for the sake of being different. My parents, on the other hand, just didn't know how to spell my name. They aren't illiterate by any means, but they'd only heard and never seen it. So I end up with a variant spelling that is often misspelled by people who know how to spell it traditionally (think Jane vs. Jayne).
But what bugs me most is not when the people I work with or my students misspell it; it's when vendors, companies, or people I'm doing professional business misspell it. Obviously they just didn't take the time to check that one little but most personal detail. In the journalism world, you get fired if you misspell a person's name. It keeps us on our toes and helps ensure that even the little facts are correct. Right now I'm considering writing to one of our wedding vendors and telling her I'll take my business elsewhere if she doesn't care to spell my name correctly----
----And now, of course, I have to tell myself to get over it as I would tell anyone who wrote into Dear Prudence or Miss Manners. My alter-ego and Self are fighting and hopefully Antietiquette will win and I'll get over this bump. Until then, however, I take time to spell people's names correctly, which includes getting those accents on the correct vowels over my Hispanic students' last names. It's a pain but they notice and I can tell it means a lot. If I spell everything else wrong, hopefully I'd get their name right. It's personal.