O`Connor versus O'Connor. Or maybe OCONNOR. Or oconnor. To make things nice for everyone, I have to rely upon some basic conventions, because if I take data as it comes in, someone, somewhere, will complain about it. Whimsical capitalization means that I have no rules to work from, and I certainly cannot rely upon the care of the people who type in the data. That means that someone, somewhere, will be unhappy. I chose to make the least number of people unhappy I could, and part of that decision is that whimsical capitalization is a decision by one person to make their own rules.Does she spell her name in all lowercase for a specific reason, or does she do it because she think it looks nice or helps make her stand out? If there's an established political/social statement being made I might get behind it a bit more, but if it's just her vanity it becomes an annoying non-issue for me.From her website: what's in a name?. An excerpt:
... it's my name and i should be able to frame it as i see fit, as my adjective, not someone else's. Why must it follow some New York Times standard guide for naming? The words that i choose to describe myself should be framed in writing and in speech in a way that feels as though i own them, as though i can relate to them. This is not to say that i wanted a unique symbol to stand for my name, simply that i wanted to write it in a fashion that showed the beauty of my mother's consideration. Of course, as i get older, i end up having a deep engrained individualization of my name. I really don't like when people remove the 'h' or capitalize my name - it's not how i've chosen to identify.It happens to read to me as "i'm a special snowflake who had a whim," but I could certainly understand why someone with a different perspective would give her reasoning more weight.
With all of these thoughts in mind, i signed my new name change papers simply as i wanted to label myself, with an aesthetic appreciation for the spelling of my name, and with a unique flair that allowed me to truly hold on to my name as my own...
> Here's my take. In this classic photo, this man is shouting, "What's my name?" Why? Because his opponentAli's "What's my name?" fight was against Ernie Terrell, not Sonny Liston... but that story gets mixed up with that picture all the time. Sonny (née "Charles") Liston wouldn't have been in the best position to have critisized a name change (and probably wasn't all that personally inclined towards making that type of point).
O Connor" or "Oconnor", because they refuse to accept either apostrophes, spaces, or both.It's critical to take what she says seriously.Because that, right there, was asking for incredible amounts of scorn. Spell your name any way you like, but realize that it's going to have ramifications if you spell it in a goofy way: people will not take you seriously. QED.
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also, delmoi
posted by not_on_display at 10:09 AM on September 30, 2009 [3 favorites]