What's In A Name?

I recently met a woman named Evergreen. Wow, that was a first. I asked, "I guess your parents were hippies?" She replied that no, they had not been, and the name was of her choosing later in life. She did not look like an Evergreen, although what that would look like I'm not sure. Certainly taller and thinner. I guess if I were naming her I'd go with "Potato" -- or perhaps the kinder, "Dumpling."

If our parents let us name ourselves when we were five or six --  you know, old enough to decide what sex we wanted to be -- I'd be Daisy. But that didn't happen. Instead my name is Andrea. Some people say ANDrea while others say ONdrea and still others, the opera types, say OnDRAYa. I answer to all, and never go to the trouble of embarrassing someone by saying they said it wrong. 

So why do names and how people pronounce them even matter? Okay, I definitely want a heads-up if someone is named Muhammed or Al-Akbar or something along those lines, but otherwise it's not that big a deal. Yet apparently to Kamala Harris it is a big deal. Just yesterday on a TV news show, one of Kamala's "team" used his precious allotted on-air time to chide the anchor for pronouncing her name wrong. What he said exactly was, "If her mother went to all that trouble to give her that name, we could all at least say it correctly."

Okay, a couple of things. First, how much trouble did the mother go to pick out that name? Obviously she had poor command of the English language and meant Pamela but spelled it wrong on the birth certificate, so that took next to no time. Second, I would say her mother had a much greater interest in her daughter's name than did every other American who never even met the woman and half of whom hate her guts, so why should we care if it's KAMala or KaMALa or whatever?

We've been hearing about how to say her name since Day One, like it matters. Is she the Queen of the World? As I see it, her self-absorption is but one of the many growing reasons to dislike her.