[Foundation-l] My public aplogies to Jan-Bart (was Movement roles letter, Feb 2012)

[Mike Godwin]

JADP, but there's no keyboard-related reason for people to misspell my
last name as "Goodwin," which is something I've encountered my whole
life. My view is that it's normally best to tolerate the misspelling,
unless there's some particular reason I want to ensure that my surname
is spelled correctly. As someone who frequently must type in French,
German, or Spanish, I wish it were a little easier to get access to
accents and umlauts than it is on most keyboards I have to use, but I
also think there are bigger issues to worry about, most of the time.
The anglophone convention of typing, e.g., "Kurt Goedel" instead of
"Kurt Gödel", is common enough that English-language versions of
search engines will normally produce results for Gödel if you type in
"Goedel."

The general rule of etiquette is, I think, simply to try to get
spelling (and pronunciation, and other things) right, and to ask the
person in question if you're unsure.

For example, although I don't believe I ever addressed Jan-Bart as
"Jan", I do know that I was uncertain early on whether there is a
hyphen in "Jan-Bart" (obviously, I figured out the answer to that
question).


--Mike