Friday, July 21, 2006

Because Nukes is Short for Nucular

Dear You Know Who You Are,

I feel the need to write you a public letter tonight because of the grave sin you have committed. Don't get me wrong--there are many sins worse than what you've done, but few that bother me as much. You violated the rule of friendship that says you do not commit a pet peeve of a friend and that if you are going to peeve off your friend for something that they truly feel strongly about, do not try to minimize their feelings on the matter.
My pet peeves are, in order of annoyance:
1. smashed tissue boxes (generally found in people's cars)
2. misspelled names
3. stickers that are either on furniture or have been half peeled off of the furniture they were previously stuck onto.
So when you wrote "Newcs" instead of "Nukes," I tried everything in my power to explain why you were spelling it wrong. Name spelling is not the work of individual creativity. The spelling of a name is prescribed to each person when they are born and named by their parents. The only people who posses spelling-change power are those with the name in question.
Let's say your name is Moshe or Bob or Mario. There are not many ways to spell those, right? Right. So, if any of those were your name, you probably wouldn't realize how sore some others might be over name spelling. If your name were Dina, however, you would understand. I've gotten Dinah, Dena, Deena, and Denah. If your last name were 10 letters long, as mine is, you would also have seen quite an interesting array of random arrangements of consonants in 10-letter forms starting with P and ending with either Y or I. It is because of my history as a victim of name misspellings that I can sympathize and fully understand the plight of those with misspelled names.
Name spelling is not a joke, Moshe or Bob or Mario.

Take care,
dp

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

On Pastries and Electronic Correspondence

A few months ago I was discussing some of the more amusing quirks of Israelis with the voluptuous Yael(two syllables I swear). She mentioned how when Israelis tell you their email address they will say the name then "Streudel" followed by the domain name. This is because the "at sign" @ looks kind of like a streudel pastrie. I'll give you an example: My (fake)email address is

"Baalteshuvabenny Streudel punksofzion.com" or Baalteshuvabenny@punksofzion.com

Obviously, I laughed at this prospect. But today I was at work when I was asking a customer her email address. As he started to recite the sequence of letters and numbers she had chosen, all I could think was "oh no, she's gonna get to the middle and say streudel and I'm going to bust out laughing." Now I work at a job (portrait photographer) where laughing is commonplace and infact encouraged, but laughing at a customer when she is giving her email address could be construed as a bit odd--to say the least. So, the woman--who was very cute, persian I think(from Great Neck)--I snickered when she got to the "Streudele" part. Luckily she didn't notice.

But, as the aforementioned Yael pointed out "Streudel" is alot more harder to say then "at." Why don't they just say it.


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