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LastName

Page history last edited by PBworks 18 years ago

Let's begin with the obvious problems, shall we?

 

Both meester and myself have hyphenated last names that means our parents both gave us a last name and they're strung together with one of those little dash-y doohickeys, called a hyphen. For me, my last name is maternallast-paternallast, and for meester, it's paternallast-maternallast.

 

Now these are fabulous names as they represent our families, specifically our nuclear families, in an unusual and fantabulous way. They also acknowledge that we are the children of two individuals, not one patriarchal unit, which is pretty hip and feminist.The problem with these names is simple: American technology and bureaocracy has not expanded to encompass the hip, hyphenated last name. This means that meester and I each have 5 credit reports: the correct name, just maternallast, just paternallast, all one word, both names with a space instead of hyphen. This gets problematic. It also causes problems with boarding flights (every airline system elides the two names and our IDs are hyphenated), with credit cards (since you need to show ID that matches the name on the card sometimes), with utilities (same problem), and so on.

 

The coolest option would be to hyphenate all 4 names, or keep our own -- the former doesn't work for all the reasons that our current names don't work, the latter doesn't work for many more reasons: since we're getting married and all, we'd like to be recognized as a family unit with a family name; since we have last names that have caused problems in the past, we'd each like a simpler name; and since there are sociohistorical problems with some of those 4 last names, we'd like to choose something with less baggage.

 

We've come up with a lot of silly plans: last names that have been dropped by women in our families, acronym for all 4 last names, anagram from the 4 last names, inside joke, made-up word, etc. but one that we keep coming back to, for all its silliness, is just hyphen. I mean, why not, right? It represents our immediate family histories in a way that already unites us... So we're somewhat stuck, because this sounds silly, making up a new last name is hard and frustrating, and we want something that sounds "real" somehow, but maybe not so real as to sound ethnic or familial.

Comments (2)

Anonymous said

at 5:36 pm on Apr 12, 2006

My father always claimed that our Irish surname had originally been O' (I won't mention it so it won't be searchable), and that coming over from Ireland, someone fell overboard and the O was used as a life preserver.
So if you replace the G with the missing O (fish it out of the water, so to speak), you have various acronym possibilities:
Shot
Hots
Tsoh (I don't know how you'd pronounce it but it looks interesting)
Thos
Oths
Or whatever.
But if a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, so would a daisy and a loaf of bread. Call yourselves whatever you like. We'll love you just the same.

Anonymous said

at 8:15 am on Apr 15, 2006

I'm not sure how Spaniards do it, but you can just string out all the names as middle names and settle on one last name. Another approach would be to take one name from each last name and hyphenate, the other 2 can be middle names.

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