Malcolm Gladwell begins his latest tussle with Steven Pinker with these confidence-inducing words:

In Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, Stephen Pinker responds to my description of him as occupying the ”lonely ice floe of IQ fundamentalism”:

If you're going to wrestle with Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker over who is a more credible authority on cognitive science, you should probably try to learn how to spell his first name, especially after the "igon values" fiasco.

By the way, that reminds me of why I'm going to go to my grave still using the adolescent-sounding name of "Steve." I noticed when I was a kid that it was hard for other people to remember whether my name was spelled "Steven" or "Stephen." For some reason, they just didn't care about the matter as much as I did. So, I eventually chose "Steve" to simplify matters for everybody.

Similarly, few can remember what the vowels in my last name are: Sailor? Saylor? Seiler? So when choosing my email address way back in 1996, I just left out the vowels from my last name: SteveSlr.

That's the kind of guy I am: just trying to be helpful.