'This is just making us look more stupid.'

What follows is an actual conversation among my co-workers (all of whom have been hired from the mainland) about using the okina in articles. The okina is a punctuation mark, shaped like a backwards apostrophe, used to signal the halting of breath between vowels of certain Hawaiian words. Currently, our policy is to exclude all okinas and kahakos unless exclusion would change the meaning of the word (i.e. ka'u instead of kau).

A: What is the name of that place again?

C: I don't know. It started with a 'K'. 'K', 'E', something...oh I don't remember.

A: Yeah it was really weird spelling. There was a space between the K and the E or something.

C: Yeah, all these places have really long names with the space thing in between. And I always put the thing in the words like they're supposed to be but R takes them out all the time. I don't know why he does that. Like this word looks weird spelled 'P', 'U', 'U', without a space between the two U's."

A: No shit.

T: I think we should include that thing between the letters like they're supposed to be. I think it makes us look ignorant and culturally insensitive that we don't include it.

C: Yeah. This is just making us look more stupid.

Me: What are you guys talking about? The okinas?

T: Is that what they're called? I guess we would look less ignorant if we actually learned what the thing is called, huh?

C: Better than me. I don't even say 'the thing' I just go like this. (She paws the air with her hand, roughly drawing an apostrophe in the air).