I couldn’t find anything on this using the search engines (those bastions of infallibility). Anyway, I was wondering just why we have middle names. I would think it is around partially as another way to identify John Robert Smith from John Hubert Smith, but what other reasons are out there?
Now that the Britannica is free, go to http://www.eb.com/ , do a lookup on “name”.
There is an article that will tell you more than you ever wanted to know (without telling you exactly what you are asking for, of course). Check out the section on onomastics within the name article. Actually, just read the whole article, then click on the article’s index to find other locations to try within the EB.
Another reason is when there are two different people who you want to honor, so instead of choosing between then, you name the baby after both of them.
A recent precedent-setting case which demonstrates my point, would be Pope John Paul I, who was the first pope to use two names, and deliberately did so in order to honor his two immediate predecessors.
My sister and I went to our parents when we were young, asking why we didn’t have middle names. My parents wanted to know why we were asking, and we explained our little friends were teasing us because they all had middle names and we didn’t. My parents then asked if any of our friends actually liked their middle names, and we said everyone hated theirs. My parents then wisely informed us THAT was why they didn’t give us middle names.
What if the hokey pokey is really what it’s all about?
On Keeves’ second question, since Arken stole the bon mot I’d planned on posting, there is a comma that should be there and is customarily omitted. When Queen Victoria made the poet Alfred Tennyson a baron, his signature and byname to every literate English-speaker became Alfred, Lord Tennyson. When the Pope made Bishop John O’Connor a Cardinal of the Church, he became John, Cardinal O’Connor, usually written without the comma.
I believe you can have as many given names as you want, in which case all except the first would be “middle” names.
In Spain we do not have the concept of “middle name” although you can have more than one given names and then you would just say you have a compound name, like Jose Luis.
Given the Spanish naming scheme there is no confusion between members of the same family even if they have the same given name as their parents because even though we have only one given name, we have two family names, from father and mother, so there is no confusion. (Women have never changed their name upon getting married, that custom seems very odd to us).
This confuses Americans who think our first family name is our middle name and would call us by our second family name.