Friday, 17 December 2021 – The Traditional Spelling

When I first started working in Employment & Skills as an Employment Adviser on a Government contract at the start of the millennium, people would usually sign off emails with their names and titles: Mr or Ms.  But, as society and business places have evolved, going out of your way to identify your gender seemed retroactive, particularly given the growing awareness of gender inequality in the workplace. Similarly, gender is not necessarily so binary and business practices are increasingly recognising and incorporating this.  Gendered titles (if not professional ones) started to be dropped from email signatures for progressive reasons.  However, this did start to cause another, more quotidian, problem: the use of pronouns.

In my first job, our Director was called Hilary Gardner.  Hers was a far superior role and, to us lowly Employment Advisers, one so high we had no idea what she did.  But, as I’m sure is common in most workplaces, and like all our woes about government is the Prime Minister’s fault, she was the mythical target of our work frustrations and we belittled her name to the satirical (at least to us then) and more down-to-earth, Hilary G.  Coincidentally, later on, a new Operations Manager joined the office, Hilary Gee (pronounced “jee”).  Gee was a he.  As well as that he upset our (rather rubbish) belittling of G, Gee became a much better target for our juvenile frustrations because he had a girl’s name!  In our mirth, it never occurred to us that he might have had other problems with his name now that, in modern ways, gendered titles in written correspondences were no longer used.  How often must he be mistaken for a woman?

In practical terms, this has been a problem for a lot of people in the workplace, especially for those with an ethnic name and it is not immediately obvious what gender they are without meeting them.  It is also a problem for those who do not identify with traditional gender identifications.  So, email signatures are evolving again, and some people include the gender pronouns in brackets, “(She/Her)”, after their name in lieu of including a gendered title which probably hasn’t been used in younger people’s entire careers.  These brackets provide a practical solution to communicating and relating with one’s colleagues and customers with whom one corresponds.

The problem with quotidian function, however, is that it can often be mistaken for fashionable practice.  People can embrace trends without really understanding the practical reasons for their adoption in the first place.  Recently I’ve seen email signatures include gendered pronouns in brackets after names that are clearly Anglo and female.  With these same types of names, I have also seen these common names phonetically spelled out when it’s bleedin’ obvious how they are pronounced and, therefore, a little bit insulting to the reader.

What has evolved most recently at the council is common names phonetically spelled out wrongly because, as I’ve already explained, if something can be bad or worse at the council, it will be.  Hammersmith & Fulham Council’s representative for the “World Class Managers Forum” is Valerie Simpson.  The remit of this forum is to help aspiring officers to gain the skills, behaviour traits and understanding of the council to help them progress in their career in management roles.  She signs off her email with,

“Valerie Simpson (Spelt with two e’s and pronounced val-ur-ree Sim-Son) She/Her/Hers.”

 

And this is what Hammersmith & Fulham Council’s World Class Managers Forum promotes in its fledgling officers; to follow the fashion of more senior officers, that is, those who have succeeded in achieving their aspirations, no matter how mis-applied or bone-headed.  I wish someone had the guts to tell Valerie, anointed keeper of council officers’ ambitions and the sherpa for the next generation of senior officers, that we know how many “e”s are in her name BECAUSE HER NAME IS WRITTEN IN THE EMAIL USING LETTERS!  Including “e”s.  Specifically two of them.  Given that, she doesn’t then need to specify how many “e”s should be contained in her name unless she is implying that she might have deliberately misspelled her name but she just wants to confirm she hasn’t, at least in terms of the quantity of “e”s used.  I don’t mean to be snobbish about this, but Valerie is a fairly traditional name and one one can be expected to spell without remedial guidance.

There is an episode of the sitcom Frasier where Niles and Frasier have regrettably acquainted themselves with a seeming gangster, Jerome, from a shadier community to their own exalted social status in Seattle.  His brush with the demimonde as Frasier puts it.  Jerome is showing off a picture of his fiancé:

Jerome: Well Brandy is a uniquely stylish woman.

Niles: Brandy?

Jerome: Yeah, the traditional spelling.

Niles: ???

 

Niles was being his usual snobby self but I feel safe to say that the name Valerie would less likely elicit queries.

Jerome showing off a picture of his fiancé, Brandy, the provenance of her name confusing Niles.

Secondly, and for the same reason, one can assume the reader already knows how to pronounce “Valerie”.  And “Simpson”.  But it’s not pronounced like that!  There is a “p” in “Simpson” and it is pronounced, albeit softly.  It is pronounced simp-sen not sim-son.  I can’t tell from this if Valerie is mispronouncing her own name or she doesn’t know how phonetic spelling works.

And, thirdly, why include three pronouns?  I’ve commonly seen two pronouns used as guidance: “She/Her”.  I assume that if you just wrote “She” after your name, it wouldn’t be clear why.  To write “She/Her” indicates more clearly that this is guidance of gender by following an established corporate protocol.  If it wasn’t a recognised protocol, to add a second pronoun, “Her”, suggests that the sender is implying that the reader might not be able extrapolate the other gendered pronouns from “She”.  To top this, Valerie provides that extra guidance to the reader by adding a third pronoun, “Hers”, to “Her” and “She” for seemingly no other reason than to help the reader with as many pronouns as possible lest he or she not know them generally.

Either that or Valerie is taking a corporate trend and trending it upwards to make it, and her, seem better.  And this is the agenda for the development of the council’s aspiring leaders in its World Class Managers Forum.  The main agenda items in yesterday’s meeting were:

1.    “Better understand how best to support and communicate with executives in [the] positions      [of]… CEO, CFO, Marketing Director, Head of Operations, HR, CIO and other senior              leaders…” and

2.   “Building a more strategic approach for your own leadership”.

In English, this translates as:

1.    “How to suck up” and

2.   2.  “How to promote yourself to those to whom you are sucking up”.

     There is no agenda for managers teaching them how to deliver better services or how different teams within the council can work together to achieve its goals (bullet-pointed on their laptops’ desktop).  Or how to pronounce your name.  This is because it is clear to those running these forums that this is not how you progress nor how the current generation of decision-makers (“executives”) got to where they are.  They are interested in how to talk the talk and nothing more.  This agenda is not dumb; in fact, it’s quite clever and insightful.  It is also mercenary and both reflects and promotes a culture of self-promotion and vacuous competition over working together to achieve common goals of helping people.  This is a revelation to my younger self when deciding what job I wanted to do.