I'm sorting and scanning some of my mom's genealogy papers. I found a little clipping tucked in of a birth announcement from our local paper.
April Marie Noha and Dale Allen Betlem of Cheboygan announce the birth of a son, Jack Daniels Stephon Tequilla Chevy John Micheals Allen, born Oct. 5th. He weighed 5 pounds, 5 ounces.....
Can you see the poor kid trying to fill out forms for the rest of his life? What were they thinking?!? LOL!
Oh noes. "Jack Daniels", "Tequilla", "Chevy", "John Michaels"? And after he's filled out the forms in his tiny handwriting, he usually gets asked if his parents know the dangers of driving under the influence... ;o)
Taipan Natureman Golden Dreadlock Mango Sinsemilla Rebel Rosethorn Swami Selassi I Wild Dolphin Marley.
someone actually named their child that in australia in the early nineties.
(the father was prosecuted because he put bob marley down as the baby's father).
i carried the newspaper clipping around for ever ....then i realised it was just clutter.
Proof that LSD and procreation shouldn't mix.
Seriously though...I'm wondering if people have thoughts on less obvious types of naming clutter. Are nicknames clutter (such that a person has essentially two names- one that they use with the people in their lives, one for official documents)? Are hyphenated last names clutter? Just wondering if there are people out there who know from experience.
I got so tired of the nicknames, diminutives and "jokes" relating to my given 1st name that after moving to a new state I took the opportunity to use my middle name. And my name didn't even have any dirty joke possibilities, it was just stupid stuff. After marriage, ditched the first name altogether.
Those are just too funny. I often wonder about some parents' creative spelling of some more "normal" names. Might look cute now, but they will be dooming their child to a lifetime of mispronunciation and continual spelling of their name.
My maiden name is a relatively unusual surname, which was constantly misspelled, so I know how tiring always having to spell your name can become.
I married while in college and DH's surname is very common. So common, in fact, that another student at the university had my name. So as not to confuse things,I hyphenated my last name. This was in the day before it was common for wives to keep their own names. It served me well in that time as a unique identifier. I still use it for legal documents and sign my bank checks that way.
When children came along it just became too complicated and confusing. At that time, the hyphenation became clutter in my life and I pretty much stopped using it, except for legal and banking applications (oh, and Facebook so old friends can find me.)
I have a unique name that is often more of a curse than a blessing. Anyways from the time I was 8 on I just stopped responding to nicknames and therefore do not have any. Personally I do not think hyphenated names are anymore clutter than middle names, actually I think it is wonderful that both parents are repersented in their child's name. I kept my given name when I married so my children's names will be hyphenated.
As far as the jokes and negative nicknames go, I remember when my best friend had her first baby, her and her husband would pick apart names they were coming up with. They would brainstorm jokes and diminutives that could come as a result of a name, and they would toss names that were too easy to pick apart. I remember thinking this was so weird at the time- but I guess kids can be cruel, and no reason to make your kid an easy target.
I've also read that boys with unusual names are a greater target of name-based teasing than girls are. Weird.
I have a very unusual last name, and a somewhat unusual first name, which amounts to a name that, when Googled, pulls up my entire biography. I probably wouldn't go this route if I had kids.
But what happens to the children when a girl with a hyphenated name marries (probably) a boy who also has a hyphenated name?
I grew up with one last name that most people put an S on the end of - but not my family. My parents were divorced when I was in middle school. My mother remarried and took my stepdad's name, but we kids still had the s-less name. Fast forward to my marriage when I was 22. Took my husband's last name - very common, easy to spell, and in the middle of the alphabet. Ahhhh. We get divorced and I go to grad school. Hmmm, there are at least 2 other women with my same name, so I add back the s-less name, giving me 4 names. That got annoying, so I went to court and had my last name changed (very easy in Washington state). I chose my maternal grandparents' last name. Still a family name, and unfortunately needs to be spelled for people all the time. Sigh. Second marriage, I kept my own name, and since it's much more the case now, I hardly ever get comments. No kids from either marriage.
@camellia tree: An aquaintance of mine put a lot of thought into her daughters' first names and finally gave them names you can't possibly shorten because she hated nicknames and diminutives. One daughter's name is Ines (pronounced e-ness), and of course her kindergarten friends called her Ini (e-nee). Sigh ;o)
I'm used to spelling my first name fairly often, but I was really caught off guard when, after moving to the Eastern part of Germany, I suddenly had to spell my last name, wtf? My last name is very common in the Western part where I grew up (I'm talking 10 pages in a 100-pages phonebook) so I really didn't know how to get used to that at first ;o) So overall, I think I would not inflict more than one difficult name on my children. Having to spell first and last name gets annoying ;o)
Also, I think Germans are fairly lucky -- you are not allowed to name your child just anything, there are certain rules as to the name actually being a valid first name, and being able to tell whether it's a female or male name (you can do that by adding a second name to an ambiguous first name) -- it's more a custom than a law though, so there are exceptions. Of course, you could say that's boring, but people still do go overboard with truly exceptional spellings of ordinary names ;o) And at least there are no Moxie Crimefighter, Maddox, Blue Angel or Apple here ;o) (Google "bizarre celebrity baby names", hee hee)
Oh, and does anyone remember that Seinfeld episode where Jerry tries to figure out a woman's name based on the fact that "it rhymes with a female body part"? So much for ruling out bad nicknames ;o)
On a different note for name clutter...
When I met my husband, he told me his name was "John Doe" (not to give out anything too personal). As we grew to know each other better, i slowly discovered this was not his name at all. his name was "James John Doe" but because his fathers name was also "James Doe" his mother always called him by his middle name, and it stuck. He also hated his first name, so he was happy for everyone to call him by his second name.
It has been an issue for him his whole life and even I have been embarrased by it a few times - for example when going to the midwife with our second child. On the form, the father's name was "James" but I introduced him to the midwife as "John". We got some funny looks and the question "So, are you the new boyfriend?" At which time we felt the need to explain - no, "James" is "John" etc etc...
Its funny now, but there is constant explanation required to banks and governemet departments, and people at work get confused when they cant find him on the roster etc because he is introduced as his second name, but listed officially as his first name...
@ozegal, I dated a guy once whose story was just like your husband's (my feeling is that this is a relatively common occurrence, as many people are named after parents). There was a plus side...if anyone came looking/calling for "James", he knew it was probably a telemarketer or someone who didn't know him.
@trillie, I definitely think the Germans are on to something with the naming rules.
@pkilmain, I had the same question as you. I think it's funny that, over the last 50 years or so, it seems like there has been an evolution of naming conventions such that women are more likely to keep their name when they get married, which sounds fairly simple. But there doesn't seem to be an accepted way of dealing with the naming of the offspring of these marriages. You can give the child the last name of the father, which is also fairly simple, except when you consider that now the mother and the child have different last names...I don't have kids, but it doesn't seem like this would be very simple. Or you can hyphenate the child's last name so that it has both names, which seems less simple in the long-term, especially when you consider what happens to that last name when the child gets married.
When I was doing a lot of genealogy research I found that naming children seems to have always been a confusing issue. Many older generations solved this problem by giving their children a first name, the middle name was the mother's maiden name, and the last name was the father's family name. Also it was not uncommon in incidents where the mother's family did not have male offspring to carry the family name to run into incidents of 8 children with the name Smith and 1 son with the name Doe as a way from her family name to carry on.
It is not uncommon where I live for people to go by their middle name and it is rarely an issue. Businesses alter phone directories, email names, etc... so there is no problem in finding the person or office.
@Demerna, too funny. I guess naming has always had clutter issues.
New Zealand has rules about naming of children that people may find interesting:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=10523288
I have a name that, before I married, was 26 characters long - this is including middle names. When we married, both my husband and I added each other's surnames to our own. (We went for my maiden name first simply because it runs off the tongue easier than the other way around.)
My surname is now 15 characters long and my entire name is 35 characters. Every so often I suggest to my husband that we change our name to "Brown". lol
When we first married, I had a number of people, who had known me previously, who said things like, "Why didn't you go for just one name?!" or "What are your children going to do?!" Yes, these comments came from men (I don't think I ever heard it from a woman). I would turn around and reply with, "We did; it's just hyphenated." and "What children?" or "They'll have our surname." or "Why don't you ask so-n-so (a friend given a hyphenated name at birth) how she copes?"
And to the old chestnut of "What about when they marry? What if they marry someone else with a hyphenated surname?! [horrors! :-0]" I would reply, "They can choose their own surname."
My sister kept her surname when she married. She married a man of Italian decent. In Italy (and China) this is normal practice. She and her DH gave her surname to their eldest child. My father-in-law is from Scotland. He has surnames as his given names - a not uncommon event for 1st-born children, particularly sons, in Scotland.
In certain parts of South America, not having two surnames means that you're an illegitimate child. I expect the stigma of that was a bigger thing a generation or two ago.
You must log in to post. If you do not already have an account, you can register here.
