e. hashman @ehashman@toot.cat

So, I guess the moral of this story is, if you're not a close friend, please don't call me by my first name, and if you're not sure how it's pronounced, call me "ehash" or "ehashman."

And to everyone else who also has to deal with constant name mispronunciation, my sympathies.

I don't hold it against my friends, but it's grating when strangers mispronounce my name. This is one of the reasons why I haven't signed my first name in years and primarily go by my handle in online spaces.

To this day, my best friends can't pronounce my name. I haven't bothered with correcting people in years. Occasionally someone like @celeste_horgan from my neck of the woods will pronounce it right on the first try and I will be too shocked to process 😵

I don't know why it's so difficult to extend others this courtesy. My name is an English name, so I'm not in nearly as difficult a position as those whose names aren't written with this alphabet. But I feel your pain.

My takeaway was that asking people to pronounce my name correctly has a large social penalty and doesn't solve the problem in question. So, since then, I have never corrected someone saying my name aloud incorrectly.

The kindest people stopped calling me by my first name and started calling me by my username, "ehashman", instead. Which often got shortened to ehash, a nickname I still go by to this day!

I was labeled "bitchy" and a "complainer". I got my frustration off my chest but I did myself no favours socially. And, crucially, no one actually changed anything. They all continued to say my name wrong, while making fun of me for the speech for months.

I opened my platform speech with, "Hi, I'm Elana Hashman. It's pronounced 'Elana', so I'd like to take this opportunity to be *absolutely certain* you all know how to pronounce my name." I nearly lost this election as a result.

In my second semester, I was running for an executive election in a student club. For the first time since I started school, I had everyone's undivided attention.

I tried to correct them, but they never picked up on it. Apparently, outside of the small region where I was born, this name isn't pronounced this way. Every single spoken interaction was like nails on a chalkboard.