sj's pet peeve #525

i've come across a rash of people lately being silly with their punctuation.

i first noticed this problem about two years ago when i was getting a badge for work -- you know, one of those office security kinds of things. now i may not have mentioned it before, but i have one of those silly hyphenated names. like, Samantha Smith-Jones. it sounds a little supercilious, i realize, but i did it because i used to be a journalist and wanted a way -- once i got married -- to tie professional name to my reporter name.

but i have to say - people have a certain idea of what a hyphenated named person should look and act like, and apparently, i'm not it.

(btw -- i'm also not Samantha-Smith Jones, although that's what i was most recently addressed as on yet another shower invite.)

but i'm also not this person: Samantha Smith'Jones. when i got my badge (remember the beginning of this post?) i told the man how to spell my last name. "S-M-I-T-H-hyphen-J-O-N-E-S." but apparently the difference between a hyphen (-) and an apostrophe (') was lost on him.

i thought that was odd at the time. but then i thought it odd all over again when last week i was sitting in a meeting with a financial person who referred to this "'" as a hyphen no less than 5 times. i looked around the room at the others in the meeting, but no one else looked nearly as disconcerted as me. "But that's an apostrophe!" i thought. i started to doubt my own sanity.

is the apostrophe actually called a hyphen in some bizarre financial accounting worlds that i don't know about? or should i have shouted out what i wanted to shout out: THAT'S AN APOSTROPHE!