2 hyphenated peeps bang, then they hyphenate their kid’s name
Sure, if you’re Hispanic and posh. Take, for example, one Antonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón.
Or Indian. I have an Indian friend with so many names that a lot of us chipped in to get her a name tag to fit them all. I forget how many she has, but it’s way more than 4, maybe 15 or so.
Many years ago I did volunteer ambulance service with an older man whose roots were in the Spanish aristocracy, and his young daughter (about 8 years old, I think) had so many names that she herself could not recite her own name.
The other hazards of unbridled name hyphenation are described in Lou Nathanson’s Tom O’Malley-Finkel-Harris-Smith.
There are even a few “quadruple-barrelled” surnames (e.g. Hepburn-Stuart-Forbes-Trefusis, Hovell-Thurlow-Cumming-Bruce, Montagu-Stuart-Wortley-Mackenzie, Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers, Cameron-Ramsay-Fairfax-Lucy, and Stirling-Home-Drummond-Moray). The surname of the extinct family of the Dukes of Buckingham and Chandos was the quintuple-barrelled Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville.
You don’t have to be Hispanic nor posh. The first thing to understand is that names have structure. Consider Portuguese names, for example. If you break them down, a person may have a couple of personal names, plus a bunch of surnames—one from each grandparent makes for exactly four, so this is not only possible but reasonably common, for instance Luisa Maria de Abreu Freire Diogo Matos, or Pedro de Alcântara Francisco António João Carlos Xavier de Paula Miguel Rafael Joaquim José Gonzaga Pascoal Cipriano Serafim de Bragança e Bourbon.
An issue which comes to mind is computers. A person’s name is going to be in all kinds of databases and I think a lot of them will have fixed length fields which aren’t going to be long enough for these 4 last names. So they will truncate in one way or another and won’t be able to locate the relevant record…
The name has to fit on the space allowed on the form for a birth certificate or something will be sacrificed.
For fairly short names a chicken will do, but the longest ones require a goat.
To be honest, to me it looks like this article falls into the “I want to feel offended so I’ll find a way to feel offended” category. I agree that some of the points he lists as myths really are wrong (such as the assumption that hall names are spelt in ASCII), but I do see a lot of merit to others.
The man whose name wouldn’t fit; or, The case of Cartwright-Chickering
His name wouldn’t fit on a punch-card for the new mainframe computer at work, so he was fired. A (fictional) book story from 1968.
In Québec, you explicitly cannot chain together 3+ names to form a surname.
If you both have compound surnames, you may, if you wish, give your child a single surname derived from one of your surnames. If you want to give your child a compound name, you must make a choice, because the child’s surname can be composed of only two parts, whether joined by a hyphen or not.
I don’t really disagree with the idea that you shouldn’t make assumptions but at the same time, I’m not sure how we could function without making some of these assumptions or something close to it . For example,
People have exactly one full name which they go by
I have a few different names I might go by and some of them have a couple of variations. I might use Mylastname , Husbandlastname. Mylastname(space)Husbandlastname , Mylastname-Husbandlastname , and my middle name , middle initial or no mention of a middle anything. And maybe my first name is Elizabeth and I’m Liz to some people and Beth to others.
All of that is just fine - I might use Mylastname at the doctor and Husbandlastname at my kids school. . It doesn’t matter that I have more than one full name that I go by - the problem comes when I expect one particular place to recognize all of my multiple names. When I want the the school to recognize Mylastname when I only ever told them Husbandlastname. Or when I want my job to use Mylastname for everything except payroll which needs to use Husbandlastname to match the bank accounts and I’m opposed to them using the hyphenated or compound version for everything.
Yeah, having a long name but using a shorter version of it (such as omitting the middle name/additional forenames, in continental European parlance) for everyday purposes really isn’t the same thing as using several names in parallel.
I would say that the list of name lies is a pretty good start on the problems.
I remember years ago discovering that there were 4 students in a class - all with apparently exactly the same name. They were Vietnamese, and again, their naming conventions simply didn’t match our expectations. Heck, I think the system still used “Christian Name” and Surname.
Then there was someone I knew who changed his name to “Mouse” Nobody knew what his real name was - it was all we ever called him, so he changed it. The bank eventually had to enter him as Mister Mouse.
Then you get into the morass of title. Mr, Mrs, Miss, Ms. Some places let you use Dr, Prof, Rev. Maybe some more, maybe less. And you get the incident where an airline passenger processing system assumed that anyone called Miss was a female child. And then proceeded to underestimate the total passenger weight by 1,250kg.
Clearly we just need to allocate everyone a UUID at birth. Tattoo the QR-code on the forehead.
Fair enough (or not), but what about the Portuguese example I gave? The woman did not chain together 3+ names to form one surname; she literally has four surnames. The practice is to go by an abbreviated name, of course, but that does not change her full name…
Even, or especially, a computer can identify an individual by a unique random number, so there (in theory) need be no confusion caused by different people with the same name or the same person having multiple names.
Lots of countries have ID numbers. The U.S. has the SSN, which for better or for worse serves the same purpose.
I did mean to mention that - there doesn’t have to be any confusion if numbers are used. But that’s really no different than imposing an additional name ( or names) on people - if some system decides my records will be kept under 111444651 with no option to look me up by name, that’s not any different than shortening my name to Mylastna because of a character limit.
That used to happen to a much greater extent than it does now. Forty years ago all sorts of places used the SS as an ID number- school, jobs etc. Now, each place gives their own number. Mostly because of identity theft, I think.