Just Call Me HusseinLien123
While I'm not an Obama supporter, I do detest stupidity. If you haven't heard or read some right wing idiot named Bill Cunningham has been continually referring to Barack Obama as Barack Hussein Obama as if attempting to make a connection between Obama's and terrorists. It's really dumb and so in solidarity with the Momocrats, I hereby rename myself husseinlien123 today and support the fight against stupid small minded bullies like Cunningham.
Being named Lien, a Sino-Vietnamese name which seems impossible for most monolingual English speakers to pronounce correctly, I can testify to some pretty horrifying butchering of my name. (I prefer just "Lin" by the way.) Most of the time this tripping over my name is innocent. Communication for my work for example is done over an instant messenger system or email more often then phone or in person and so most of my coworkers these days see my name before they have to speak it. Typically in meetings or conference calls where I'm speaking with coworkers for the first time, there's some butchering going on. "Lee-in" or "Lee-en" are understandable, though a number of users seem to be incapable of switching to the preferred version, "Leen" is awful, and "Lion" usually allows me to use my other talent of shooting someone a "WTF?" look.
No one has made me feel bad about my name in a long time, hell, the last time someone did it was fourth grade. Fun variations of my name (according to my tormentors) were "Alien", "Line", or in a strange twist of actually pronouncing it correctly, "Evil Lynn", He-Man was popular back in the day. We were 8 (Bill Cunningham is how old?)
--husseinlien123
6 comments:
glad you left the 123. ;)
I couldn't believe the stupidity of Cunningham, you can call me AngelaHussein.
Bravo!!!
I must admit I have a hard time pronouncing names and words. My sister is a teacher and a long time ago she said: I do not know what that means. I was mispronouncing hyperbole. I said it the way it looked to me: an active child and a wrapped sandwich. (as in Stromboli).
My name is easy to pronounce and spell, yet teased since childhood about lambs, virgins and being contrary.
OH MY. I guess I'm Mama Hussein Nabi today. Idiots. Sadly, soon-to-be-ex-FIL thinks the same way - I believe he's already sent around an email about Obama being a muslim, therefore a terrorist. Yeah. I'd have thought these people were few and far between - and then I married into a family of these bright-thinkers.
Funny enough the hubby and I were talking about this last night. It's so stupid that someone's heritage can be mocked at and obviously a few people will have a distorted view about Obama because of that. Anyway as someone with a name almost impossible to be pronounced correctly (Anh), I know what you mean because there has got to be at least four or five versions of my name that I have heard of (Ann is what most people ended up calling me).
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