Monday, January 14, 2008

The Importance of a Name - Barack Obama

I have to apologize to Barack Obama (and anyone I've tried to correct). I have been spelling his name without the "C" in Barack. A number of people I know have been spelling it that way. I just checked his website and found that I was wrong.

There are different ways to ignore or insult people. One way is to misspell or mispronounce their name. Of course it's often easy to do this with a name that is not very common, like "Barack" - I guess those of us who were mistaken might have thought the "c" would have been in a more American name. Instead we associate him with Africa.

If we don't spell someone's name right, does that mean we are not taking them seriously enough to find out the exact spelling? I am not a solid Obama supporter, but at the same time, I am not against him. Yet, I must have not taken him seriously to get all the specifics before I wrote about him.

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