Last week I posted a photo of a sign hanging on Main Street in Jonesborough. An arrow pointing up a little side street to the “Febuary B & B.” My caption read: “I love egregious typos.”
On Saturday I mentioned the sign to a gentleman who was familiar with the town and its citizens, and he told me that the family whose name has for generations been pronounced as it is spelled –”Feb-Yew-Airy” — has, for generations, had to defend their good name from frustrated copy editors, such as I, who are quick to pounce and poke fun.
I empathize with the Febuary descendants.
I’m the oldest “Megan” I know, and I do remember a childhood and adolescence of misspellings and mispronunciations. In college, when I got hired at Disneyland, the costume department didn’t have a “Megan” name tag, so they gave me one that said “Midge.” Five letters. Starts with M. Close enough.
I bristled.
And then, face down on the asphalt between the costume shop and the locker room, there lay an orphaned name tag. I picked it up and read, “Gordy.” For the nine months I worked in the Magic Kingdom, that was my name.
Nobody misspelled it. Nobody mispronounced it.
That cracks me up. When I first came to Seattle straight out of college I worked for about a month at Frederick and Nelson’s. The badges were white on red, and I discovered that you could use a pin to scrape the red off to alter the lettering of the badge. It was a week before my supervisor noticed that my Staff badge was spelled STAPH. She thought it was a typo and told me to get a new one, but I never did, as I preferred being a staph member.
If you had been at the Tomorrowland Coke Terrace in 1969, I probably wouldn’t have hated that job. But then, you only worked a month at F&N. Maybe the magic kingdom would have turned us both out on Day One.
Probably so!
Oh, Megan, we all make those gaffes from time to time. At least you are taking advantage of the opportunity to set things aright! And your posts about Jo’bro have been fun to read!
And to Mary Grace, if that’s the worse they do to your name, you are inded lucky. Try messing with Herrera when you have absolutely no knowledge of Spanish and its pronunciation! We get some good laughs!
Julie, I’m so much readier to write when I feel someone’s out there tuning in every once in awhile. Thanks for your contribution to the blogfuel supply.
Herrera… That, and all of Spanish for that matter, seems so straightforwardly phonetic. Must be all those soft consonants In the same place at the same time that throws us English speakers for a loop.
When people call to ask for Mr. or Ms. “Kenter,” we hang up fast. Clearly it’s nobody we know! That said, if I were a Febuary, I just might call my place of business, where I greet strangers daily, “Jonesborough B & B.”
Maybe that streak of pragmatism is one of the differences between southerners from Texas and southerners from Tennessee.