I am a big fan of Miss Manners and have gotten very good at the bright chirrupy, “Why do you want to know?” answer, or “Where on earth did you find that written down? Oh, I rarely go by my legal name.”
If I am not in the mood for Miss Manners I have also gotten good at the unsmiling, very serious response. It lets people know they’ve tread on territory they’re not welcome.
Seriously, my first name is beautiful! It has thousands of years of history and meaning behind it. Just take it like Anaamika and Mika; it’s “anAAmeeka”, not"afghdfkja".
Seriously? I can think of a half dozen good reasons to change your name besides those. One of my mom’s bosses changed her name (I don’t know if it was legally or not) every time she started a new business for numerology reasons. That was silly.
Changing it because you dislike your name, or to simplify it, or you want to distance yourself from people you have bad history with, or just to start new someplace (as many immigrants have done throughout history)? Perfectly reasonable.
And people get annoyed when their names are mispronounced because that’s not their name. It’s rude and it implies you think so little of them that you can’t bother to get their basic identification correct. (Yes, a basic mistake should be forgiven. When it happens every time over your life? grrrrrr)
I don’t mind as much now because at least my name gets to something that represents the letters there, but getting called Linda when my name was Lydia, especially if you saw it in writing? Stabworthy.
I’m posting without reading the thread, just because I’m like that.
I don’t think it’s remotely pretentious. If the name your parents gave you is displeasing to you, why should you be saddled with it?
I haven’t legally changed my first name, but I’ve pretty much abandoned it; no one but my father and three of my eight siblings ever use it. I HATE my given name and always have. Between that and the fact that my late mother never intended to use it in addressing me (she always used the middle name), I see no reason to stick with it. People who think I’m disrespecting my parents can bite me.
Why shouldn’t people be called what they want? (Within reason: I’m not addressing anyone as “Doctor” unless they have an earned doctorate and/or a TARDIS.)
Those aren’t rhetorical questions, by the way. I honestly don’t see why people are vexed when others act to define themselves.
This is kind of the defintion of pretentious. The names your ancestor had and the name your mother/parents decided to give you aren’t GOOD enough for you. That’s pretentious. More so, when you think certain people (and groups of people) will never know the true names of their ancestors because they were forced to change them.
Ideally people *should *be called what they want but since that doesn’t always happen and one has little control over others’ actions it seems a waste of energy to get uptight about it. Speaking for myself and only myself, I’m not particularly vexed about people and their feelings about their name, I was just trying to explain that I find ones’ name one of the *least *defining things about a person. Obviously I’m in the minority here( and no offense is intended).
I’d give you a point there, if it weren’t for the fact that so many people still, automatically, start calling a married woman by her husband’s name, and quite a few will continue to do so despite being corrected. And I don’t mean just his surname - Alicia Jones becomes “Mrs. Todd Smith” regardless of anyone’s preference in the matter.
So… if a woman’s name is worth so little, regardless of the care with which her parents bestow it, who the hell cares if she changes it for a reason other than marriage?
This business about needing to keep one’s name and knowing one’s ancestors clearly only applies to men’s names in the Anglosphere. (The custom is unknown in many other cultures outside Europe).
One of my nieces is considering changing her name because she has never had a relationship with her father, he’s never supported her in any fashion, and she loved my parents. She’s thinking of changing her last name to her mother’s maiden name.
One of my other nieces married last year. She’s one of four daughters, no sons. Her husband chose to change his last name to hers, instead of the other way around. He knew my brother-in-law had always wanted a son to carry on the family name.
There are some communities in India in which a girl’s in-laws (and I mean “girl” literally) change her given name at marriage, without regard to her or her parents’ opinions. Of course, Indians are often accustomed to being dubbed with different names by different people and also if the marriage takes place at a young enough age, it might not be such a big deal to her.
Not really. You are a woman; no employer or college is going to bat an eyebrow if you used to be known under different surnames. They’ll just assume any name changes were due to marriage and be done with it.
My cousin got all manner of grief from her husband’s family over not taking his name. You know how some women complain about constantly getting mail addressed to them with their husband’s name? That didn’t bother, but the fact that most of her in-laws returned-to-sender (unopened) any mail she sent them (including holiday cards) with her name on the return address lable. Her grandmother-in-law was extremely hostile. In the long run she managed to save herself alot of paperwork when she got divorced.
Do you feel the same way about a woman who stops using the surname her parents’ gave her in favour of her husband’s? All the same arguments you just made apply.
My brother from my Mom’s first marriage changed his name when he was 13. He was named after his father, who turned out to be an abusive drunk rapist & thief. He never saw him again after the age of 7. So he went to court to take Mom’s name. He ran into a bit of a problem since technically he needed both parents’ consent and nobody had the slightest clue how to get in touch with his father, but the judge allowed it anyway (oddly he did insist on written approval from our grandfather for some reason).
There’s a customer at work who changed his last name after he found out his biological father was not who he thought it was. His presumed father was not in the picture anymore, and when he met his biological father he decided he liked bio-dad better than presumed dad so he changed his name to reflect that.
I don’t think changing your name is automatically pretentious. To me it depends on the reason and what you change it to. A fresh start after a divorce to something not outrageous (using a grandmother’s maiden name is a nice way to keep it in the family) doesn’t sound pretentious to me at all.
My senior year in college, our class president (who was a conceited fathead) changed his name halfway through the year to something like Blackmont G. Wyoming (that’s not actually what he changed it to, but that was the pattern) and started coming to class in suits and ties.
My two best friends and I started referring to ourselves as Pinkerton Q. Hawaii, Purplemont R. Maine, and Silverton X. Nebraska.
I changed my name in 2007 for the bolded reason above, and never felt a twinge a pretentiousness. Granted, I’m a woman, and my family was all for it, but I’d’ve done it even if that hadn’t been the case. Changing my name gave me a little distance from my past and allowed me to be..me.
His father is a total dick, though, so he decided he didn’t want to go by his dad’s name, so he picked a new first name. He kept his dad’s surname only because his grandfather was a very good man, so to him to ditch his surname would be to ditch his grandfather’s surname.
I call him by his new name but in my mind he’s always gonna be name #1.
Granted, I’m a woman, and my family was all for it, but I’d’ve done it even if that hadn’t been the case. Changing my name gave me a little distance from my past and allowed me to be..me.