My own surname is probably about 70-80 years old – several of my second cousins have a slightly different name because my grandfather changed his (for unknown reasons) back when he began his career.
–Cliffy
It seems though that the larger the pool of a certain surname, like “Smith”, the more it would grow to “eat up” the smaller pool surnames, like “Jinglehiemerschmit”. As soon as the J’s have only daughters, it’s over.
Also, I have no idea what I’m talking about.
Though the likely ness of internet screen names becoming real names is highly conjectural, if people become better known to more people through their screen name, then it would be reasonable to consider their screen name as their actual name.
If everyone calls you Marilyn Monroe does that overwhelm the given name of Norma Jean ? As an example from entertainment ‘screen names’.
I’m in the process of changing my surname to “Robot”.
My given surname has some unfortunate associations, and in my line of work I need a good last name. I’m not too fond of any of my family’s last names, and it seems a little strange to adopt some other family’s last name out of thin air. So I figured I’d go with a word that has personal meaning (well, I kind of like robots) and sounds cool, and i liked the idea of using a word that was coined fairly recently.
No plans on having kids though, so I’ll likely be the end of the Robot line.
My surname was invented sometime around 1948 by my grandfather…family legend has it that my uncle couldn’t spell the old one in first grade.
Unfortunately, the name did already exist, at least a little. There are about 10 people with my last name somewhere in Wisconsin, but they’re unrelated to me.
I can think of nothing more sad than a family name based on something so transient as current technology. Even the most long lived computer languages have short lifespans. Cobol may not be dead but it sure smells funny and Java will face the same fate. It would be like naming a baby TRS-80.
Traditional occupation names are another matter. Even in the distant, George Jetson future there will still be barrels so Cooper will still have a meaning. I pray we never live in a world where there are no 'smiths making iron horse shoes but when Java goes away I’ll never miss it.
Bruce_Daddy No, actually, you’re entirely right about that. Well, at least, someone did a simulation - started with a few hundred equally distributed surnames and had them marry at random - and they ended up with one or another surname much more common every time. So maybe there’s nothing special about Smith; but some name was going to get lucky.
OTOH, I don’t think it’s going to go on growing like that for ever. But maybe I’m wrong, maybe it will. Of course, in the real world, we’ll probably abandon surnames when over 50% of them are Smith 
Perhaps appropriate since at the end of your line you’ll probably be boxed & shipped.
This is what I meant. I recall a couple that made a new last name from the letters in their last names, i.e., Jane Smith marries and Fred Jenkins, and they both change their last name to Sminkins. Although that is a lousy example.
This isn’t family names but – In the neighbourhood where I grew up there was a couple named Jerry and Sheryl. They named their son Jeryl and their daughter Sherry.
acsenray, it’s funny you should mention that because I once knew this couple named Begma and Smuttchunk…
My last name is along the lines of Van Dingleberry (not exactly that). I have cousins who shortened it to Van Dingle, and second cousins that are just Dingle. Out of laziness more than anything else.
Funny you should say that.
SF author Ian Watson has a story in his book Stalin’s Teardrops called “From the Annals of the Onomastic Society” which discusses both sides of this particular debate. One character gives a disquisition proposing that new surnames (and possibly new people) are being spontaneously generated out of nowhere. Another character then reveals that, to the contrary, he is from the distant future in which all other surnames have been subsumed under one – everyone has the last name “Chang” – and that he’s come back in time to “collect” names for people to use in the distant future. An amusing story (and a very, very creative short story collection overall).
If you do ever have kids, here’s a couple of suggestions for first names:
Robbie.
Anything beginning with “I”.
Kryten
even sven, I think “Robot” as a surname sounds awesome!
As for whoever asked about Icelandic surnames, the way it works is that if you’re a boy you take your father’s name and generally add -sson. If your father’s name ends with an I, the I becomes A and you add -son, and if your father’s name ends in -ur you leave it out – there might be other rules I don’t know about; I think it’s just the Icelandic possessive form. If you’re a girl you take your father’s name and add -dottir, with the same rules as above. I might be wrong on some of the finer points because I don’t speak Icelandic and have only been there once, but that’s the basic naming system.
Since family names don’t generally exist*, people are listed in the phone book by first name.
Since my father’s family moved to America when he was two years old, my last name only dates back to his father, and is thus derived from the name of his father, my great-grandfather.
And as for the comments about fewer and fewer last names becoming more and more common, I believe it’s Vietnam where the surname Nguyen has become so common that everyone named Nguyen also has an additional surname to reduce confusion.
*There are some exceptions: for example, there was a period in Icelandic history when family names became slightly trendy, and as a result, my paternal grandmother’s family all have one surname.
Many new immigrants to Israel change their names to something Hebrew. Sometimes just translating the original (e.g., Harpaz instead of Goldberg - both mean “golden mountain”), and some taking names phonetically similar to the original (e.g., Shamir instead of the Arabic Samir), or - as others above have already mentioned - based on their place of birth (Mizrachi, Zan’ani, etc…).
These names are often already there, but every once in a while someone comes up with something totally new (completely different? :))
A few years ago I read about the re-introduction of surnames in Mongolia a few years ago, where family names had been abolished by the then Communist government in the 1920s. The legislation allowed people to more or less freely pick a name, with the result that a large portion of the population chose Borjigin, Genghis Khan’s clan name.
In India, we have a Banker, Merchant, Sodabottleopernerwala and also Pilot (a pilot-turned-politician changed his name to Rajesh Pilot, after people couldnt pronounce his real surname). In time, i think we will have a javaprogammer as well!!
Yes, there is something special about “Smith”. It’s very frequent in western surnames because it comes from occupation(s) that were extremely common in the culture.
Every village in the middle ages had their blacksmith; it was a very neccessary occupation. (It produced both the Black and Smith surnames.) Larger towns also would have had whitesmiths (tin smiths, menders of pots & pans) And one source of the White & more Smith surnames). Also goldsmiths and silversmiths in larger towns.
So Smith, generically applied to any kind of metal-worker, was one of the most common occupations at the time surnames were being widely adopted.
The equivalent of “Smith” is the commonest surname in some European nationalities. Years ago Playboy Enterprises produced a made-for-TV movie, meant as a pilot for a series, about a working class Chicago family of Polish extraction named “Kovaks”. The late Mike Royko–a Polish American–had a field day with that one. “Kovaks” is the single commonest Hungarian surname. The Polish equivalent is “Kowalski”, which is the single commonest Polish surname. Both mean “metal worker”; that is, “smith”.
Are any Slavic-speaking Dopers reading this thread? It seems possible that something close to “robot” is already a surname in Czech. The word “robot” was coined by the Czech author Karel Capek for his play R.U.R.. The title stands for “Rossum’s Universal Robots”, a corporation in the future which develops a line of all-purpose worker/slaves, and then encounters problems along the lines of those in the Planet of the Apes movies. “Robot” is said to be derived from a Slavic word for “laborer”, and the person who first translated the play into English had the inspiration to leave it in the play rather than coining an English equivalent.
Back in the 70s, a law student in St. Louis who had been raised in various foster homes and had an extremely varied ethnic background changed her last name to “Montage”.
There used to be a judge in St. Louis (or was it his brother who was a college professior–I forget), who shortened his Italian surname and rendered it into phonetic English because people had so much trouble with it.
My grandfather, an Irish immigrant, did something of the same kind, but then, so did a lot of Irish immigrants; there are remarkably few people in America, I expect, named “Mologna” or “Mahugna” for instance, though their descendants are legion. People in Ireland often find it amusing that Irish Americans don’t know the “right” way to pronounce their own names.