Pet Peeve

This is a small thing, a trivial matter. It is of no particular import in the political struggle going on today, and will not affect the future a bit. A broader minded, more tolerant person than myself might never even think twice about it. Nonetheless, it is a thing which pisses me off and I am going to vent.
My name is not an unusual name, and it is not hard to spell. Admittedly, there is more than one spelling. Willy Wonka is spelled with a y, and Willy Brandt, the former Chancellor of West Germany, back in those ancient times when Germany was more than one country. But I can’t think of any others.
Still, I can understand how someone who has not seen my name in print might take a guess and use the wrong spelling. I’ve done that myself, with other people’s names. Mark or Marc, Eric or Erik, Isabel or Isabelle, Ann or Anne, Jon or John, Willy or Willie. If you don’t know you take a guess, and if the person is bothered they can correct you, you can apologize and life goes on much the same way as it did before.
But, if they are replying to a comment I made on the internet, my name is sitting there, in bold print, right in front of their stupid face, spelled exactly the way I choose to spell it, the way I have spelled it my entire life. And they get it wrong.
Is it blind ignorance? Is it deliberate? Not sure, but I suspect that people who misspell it under such circumstances are the same ones who misspell common words and when they are called on it say “Hey, you knew what I meant, it was a typo,” as if there were no way of editing your posts, no way of correcting a typo. Do they actually think the massive number of red and blue underlines on all of their posts are decorative? Have they not realized that a right click will provide them with the correct spelling? Maybe not.
Maybe being stupid is a little bit like being poor. Once you’re in it, it’s really hard to get out.