A simple act of grace ...

You know, it seems sometimes like we’re running out of things for which to hate people. No, it’s true. A headline grabbed me this morning. This “pundit” named Laura Ingrahm was all over some candidate for the way she pronounced her name. Geez, I would think that if there ever was a personal freedom, it resided in the way we pronounce our own name.

Maybe Laura Ingrahm doesn’t think so. Or maybe she just picked up on another way to spread the kind of distrust, divineness, and, well … hatred that her particular career, and employer, demands.

With a name like mine, I’m a little sensitive about the topic. Southerners, in my experience, like to make a scene about how to say it. Jerks in the United States Navy had a field day with it. Sainted Mother bristled about it, but had a nice retort, for a while anyway, for tradespeople who made a scene about how to pronounce it. “It’s funny,” she would say, “but I have a three-year-son who can pronounce it without any trouble at all.” She used it until my little brother was about 15.

For reasons known only to himself, my father simplified (in his estimation) the spelling on our birth certificates. I think it had to with the fact that he was never particularly proud of his heritage, having gone through World War One as a teenager and having been subject to a number of sobriquets, the most benign of which was “dirty Hun.” Then, a man named Hitler finished off any lingering affinity with “the Fatherland.” Daddy even posted a sticker on the front window of our little grocery store, “Americanism, our only ‘ism.’”

That wasn’t like him, but it appeared during a period in which one of the greatest hate-mongers (a title now being severely challenged) America has produced was dominating the news cycle. Yes, that would have been Joseph McCarthy. People feared him, and his pit bull Roy Cohn, to the extent that they would often express a “sympathetic hatred” that they didn’t even feel. One can see it today if one looks hard enough.

But back to my name. Luckily, I once had a close attorney friend, a Harvard grad in fact, who started his own firm. Suffering from boredom during the startup period, he tempted me with several offers of free legal work. Failing at divorce, bankruptcy, a suit over a neighbor’s barking dog, or a class-action suit over the mental damages caused by the reading of Ayn Rand, he finally settled on getting my name spelled right, by court order, and for free.

From a simple act of kindness, I’m now able to, without fear of unkind criticism, express, with each signing, the full fact of Teutonic royalty in a name that once drew the sort of vitriol that fuels people like Laura Ingrahm.

So, there you go. Using the pronunciation (or spelling) of a person’s name as an act of love, rather than one of hate, seems a good move to me. In fact, wouldn’t this world be a better place for a day if we all decided that we won’t express any act of hatred? After all, it only points out to the world that we have an abscess on our soul.

Yes ... the "von" indicates royalty,
So take that, you fear-mongering
sack of ... . No, wait, I'm
supposed to be good today.
Belay my last. Insert instead,
"My precious friend."