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Old Jun 21, 2015, 06:33 AM
Anonymous200320
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Well, the important thing is that it bothers you. Names can be important, they are part of our identity, and if somebody who is important to us can't quite remember our name it might feel as if they don't quite remember us. My last name is often mispronounced and misspelt - it is a unique name which only about half a dozen people have, and I pronounce it differently in different languages - but when my T writes it on prescriptions and other forms he never misspells it, and that feels pretty important to me. I suspect he looks at my records to get it right. But the main thing is that he bothers to do that! I've never heard him say it and I don't know how he would pronounce it.

I'm very sure that the misspelling/mispronunciation doesn't mean that he doesn't care. For some people it's hard to get spellings right, and even if you write your full name in his appointment book and he sees it in your emails, chances are that he doesn't "read" it as such; it registers as an image (as well-known words do in our brain) and so the spelling is not part of what he sees. There's a meme going aound the Internet at intervals, which claims that only the first and last letter of words are important. That claim is incorrect, as explained here by one the people who did the actual research, but the fact is that reading usually doesn't involve letter-by-letter decoding of most words that are already familiar to us. And the other side of that is that people often do not pick up on subtle spelling issues in words they recognise. I bet that's also why he said it wrong.

Again, if it bothers you, it's worth bringing up.
Thanks for this!
Ellahmae