Personally I don’t see anything pretentious about hypenated surnames either on married people or their children. I don’t understand why anyone would get worked up over it. Or get worked up over a woman not changing her name or a man changing his. I knew one person in high school that had a hypenated name. He got alot of shit from the boys’ gym teachers (& only the boys’ gym teachers) over it. One even sent in to the principal’s office because he refused to tell him what his father’s name was so the teacher could call him by his “proper name”; forcing the teacher to look it up in school records for himself. :smack: Of course the joke was on him since both parents used the hypenated name.
What about them? If anything I find them less annoying and full of themselves that people who think their preferred naming convention is the One True Way and everyone who chooses something different is a wanker.
And yes, in the interest of full disclosure, hyphenation was an option I seriously considered. I ultimately rejected it when my husband made it clear not a single letter of his name was going to change; it seemed pointless to go to hassle of changing my name only for us to still not have the same name.
(bolding mine)
Getting worked up over things like that is stupid and reactionary, but hardly incomprehensible. Creating new family names by hyphenating the surnames of a husband and wife is an explicit challenge to the conventional power structure. I think it’s a good idea, though I’d not pass the hyphenated names onto the offspring; that quickly becomes unworkable.
My ex-brother-in-law had this attitude, and affected not to see how it was basically the same as asking my sister to assume his name. He’s even made annoyed noises about her reverting to her birth name after the divorce.
This is where I indulge in a bit of cultural pretentiousness, or maybe is it condescencion 
and mention that around here, ** nobody’s** name legally changes upon marriage. Emiliana Soto Sanchez marries Rafael Marrero Rivera and they each stay exactly that before the Law (their child is then Maria Marrero Soto).
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that nobody should use big words. Maybe it only annoys me when this particular woman does it. It’s like she’s talking in marketing-speak, or like she’s trying really hard to sound sophisticated and smart - why say “get” when I can say “pursue”? Why say “discuss” when I can say “explore”? It’s just got a Diane Chambers vibe to me that comes across as pretentious.
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Atheism believes there is no god. Not whether there is more proof that there is no god than that there is one. Same with theism. Neither side takes the strength of either position into account.
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Isn’t saying “I don’t know and no one can possibly know” a better answer than offering false proofs?
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Isn’t saying you know something that is unknowable more pretentious?
I work in the industry and there is a bit of snobbery going on when it comes to the clothes, but those outfits are comfortable, do reduce drag, wick sweat, and are safer when riding in tight groups (no snagging baggy clothes on the other guy’s bike, etc…)
The whole colonic fad.
“Detoxing,” unless you have a drug or alcohol problem.
Wine snobs.
Raw milk.
Smart phones.
Smartphones are pretentious? What about cells? What about cells when they weren’t as catholic (catholic with a small c, how’s that for pretentious?), 10 years ago?
If you like your computer, why are smartphones pretentious?
That only makes sense if you make belief in God the default position.
For most things we assume they don’t exist unless there is evidence. Especially things that are logically inconsistent and not compatible with known physical laws. Are you pretentious if you think elves don’t exist?
And why do you think God is unknowable? Most religions have a God that actually does (or did something) tangible that is clearly knowable.
You can say God is unknowable, but that is a tautology" “there is something unknowable, we call it God, therefore God is unknowable”.
I agree that it’s attitude more than acts. It’s not what someone buys or talks about but when they wrongly grant themselves superior status over it that gets on my nerves. When they try to cheat and pass themselves off as more than they are (“pretentious”/“pretend”). Legitimate status has to be earned, and granted by society. You don’t get it by tooting your own horn. No wait, come to think of it, that should actually be encouraged because it is hilarious. 
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That is indeed precisely what atheism and theism are but you don’t need 100% certainty to believe either of them, you need only to judge one likelier than the other to believe that it corresponds with reality.
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Yes, to a different question. It says nothing about the existence of god, only about the extent to which people can know about the existence of god.
It’s very fundamental to recognize the difference between ‘is there a god?’ and ‘can we know whether there is a god?’; if the answer to the latter is no then the former remains unanswered. -
Sometimes very much so, but people like that may be mistaken about what they know. A theist advancing such an argument expects people try to prove him or her wrong. In fact it is in the nature of dialectic that people should submit wrong arguments that they believe to be right.
I think it’s pretentious, but I wouldn’t hassel someone over it. I’m going to keep my opinion on it to myself, further than finding it pretentious, because clearly some are sensitive to the issue.
You are kind of full of yourself if you give your child a surname they wouldn’t have as a middle name/hyphen. It’s kind of like X name is so great or the family’s history is so great. Everyone must KNOW my child is part X through their great grandmother’s uncle twice removed. :rolleyes:
On the bold, my issue is where do hyphens stop? So, I marry a guy and we become mylast-Hislastname. What do my great grandkids become? Theirmomslastname-theirgrandmother/fatherlastname-mylastname-hislastname? I think it’s a slippery slope. It just screams pretentious.
Is this a bad place to say that I find the (apparently) American usage of the word “naiveté” and associated pronunciation instead of the anglacised “naïvety” really, really pretentious.
And yes, I accept that some people may find my use of the ï pretentious.
^ But I must admit I do sometimes twitch at American pronunciations of some French words ending in ‘re’:
‘Sart-’ and ‘Louv-’ spring to mind.
pdts
As JRDelirious illustrated, one way to do it it–this works with or without hyphens–is for children to take one name from each of their parents. For parents hyphenating themselves for the first time in their lines, this yields a nuclear family all with the same combination. But that will not be true for all subsequent generations.
I would like to ask for an exception for people for whom that word is in their first language - specially when they happen to never have heard it in English before.
Berating someone from Spain for saying Floh-REE-dah when she’s never heard it in English and doesn’t know that in English it’s FLOH-ree-dah… that’s both pretentious and o-so-precious. (Note that I say “berate”, not “correct”: corrections are fine and welcome)
Yeah, if speaking more than one language was pretentious, not only would about 40% of the population of the board not be here (based on a poll we had), but international comerce would have a biiiitsy of a problem. It’s all in how you do it.
With my apologies to anybody who finds this pretentious, but YaraMateo, you can multiquote (like I did in this post) by clicking on the ["+] button at the bottom of each post and then the
[quote]
button for the last one. You’re welcome 
Thank you for reaching out to share this with us. 