For my first encounter with lowercase xi, I was sure the professor was taking advantage of his tenure and trying to pass off a scribble as a variable, and that

For my first encounter with lowercase xi, I was sure the professor was taking advantage of his tenure and trying to pass off a scribble as a variable, and that was with my having made a point to familiarize myself with the Greek alphabet the previous semester. Somehow I don't remember him bothering to pronounce it! Then there are the German algebraists who developed ring theory, for whom Greek letters were not sufficient -- they reached for their Fraktur. The correspondences for certain letters -- like A and S -- can be inscrutable to neophytes. While I get why notation shouldn't matter, I do find it to be more tiring to read new notation where I don't already have an internal pronunciation.