April. Elliott. Kent.

So... admittedly, this is kind of a stupid thing to get annoyed about, and I must be having some kind of tough Mercury transit or something, but...

My name is April Elliott Kent.
Not April Elliot Kent.
Not April Elliot-Kent or April Elliott-Kent.
And certainly not April Kent-Elliott.

April. Elliott. Kent.

I'm more or less used to the dropped-t, because Elliott was my maiden name and people have been trying to rob me of that last -t all my life. I don't know why. I guess it's an honest mistake, but sometimes I suspect people think I don't know how to spell my own name. "Oh, her finger hit the 't' too many times, let me fix that for her." No. My finger knew exactly what it was doing. My father spelled it with two t's, as did his father, and so on. I'm not being greedy, taking an extra -t that doesn't belong to me. I own that sucker.

My name is not hyphenated because my last name is Kent. Elliott is my middle name. See? I like to use all three names. I understand the confusion - these are complex times we live in! - but I am not hyphenated. Because Elliott is not part of my last name.

Now, April Kent-Elliott is an entirely new one. Apparently it came up on a Google search when someone was looking for me, and they were nice enough to pass along the link. It's a little scary, because the link was to a catalog entry for a book I contributed to. Is the person who created the catalog the same person who is designing the book? Gack!

April. Elliott. Bloody. Kent, people. It's not like I'm named Schwarzenegger or something. Thank God. Because that would really be something to bitch about. Maria Shriver might've been crazy enough to marry the guy, but even she didn't hobble herself with that spelling-bee nightmare of a name.

She probably gets sick of people calling her a Kennedy, though.