a brave new name
merge points me towards the story of jodi wilgoren (the bureau chief of the nytimes in chicago, i think) and her name change. it's not just any old name change - she and her husband, unable to reconciles themselves with her taking on a new name or joining their names, combined their two last names to come up with an entirely new one. wilgoren+ruderman=rudoren.
Tradition hardly seemed enough reason for me to take his name, and I didn't want to have a different name from my future children. I imagined them asking why and realized the only possible answer was patriarchy. I didn't want my family founded on that principle. When I suggested that Gary put himself in my place — in the place of most women — facing the choice of abandoning his family name or of not having the same name as his kids, he eventually became a convert to combination.
additionally, fontana labs noted this older new york times wedding profile in which the couple invented an entirely new last name upon marriage.
is it just me, or is this ABSOLUTELY EFFING INSANE? first off, your progeny will have a lot more trouble finding out about you. i might not have known that my great-great grandfather was a chinese immigrant to san francisco who ended his life under a horse-drawn cart if he had changed "hoy" to, uh, "hoysomething else." second off, don't yall have ancestral pride? go andrews. it might not be the most original last name ever, but i like it. however, frankly, whenever the time comes for the scary marriage thing, i have no idea what i'm going to do. i can't see dropping my last name off into some void of never-to-be-seen-againness. the hyphenation thing just seems too cumbersome. and there is no way in hell i am making up a new last name. unless it is "awesome." but really, that is already implied.
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yeah, i was thinking about this after i posted that, and, really, i'm all for people just staying with their last name from birth to death.
everybody. man. woman. straight. gay.
just keep your name.
you and your partner can figure out amongst yourselves whose name(s) the kids are going to take, but that's it. then it's up to them to keep that name forevs themselves.
some interesting insights...i'm engaged to your friend laura's brother, and we went to meet with the priest at my parish about the ceremony the other night. he actually asked, "you're going to change your name to that???" of course, spadanuta is a far cry from young, so it will take some getting used to. my mom suggested that, like your friend, we merge our names, and came up with "younuta" although then people might think we're japanese even though he's italian and i'm 6 other european nationalities. geneaology would definitely be thrown a huge curve ball with that one!
(my sister liz and i are coming to visit for a few days beginning feb. 18th...maybe we'll get to meet up :-))
I had a friend whose last name was Black and planned, if he married a woman with the last name White, to change their names to Gray.
Didn't happen, sadly.
I'm Hispanic so the naming convention is to append all the names possible to indicate social status... kinda like having the name Kennedy Shriver Schwarzenegger. Typically, building long names isn't done anymore since society doesn't place such an emphasis on class (at least not as much). Both my sisters insisted on keeping their names when they got married, but over time decided to take their husbands name first (with the hyphen). Lately they've just taken the whole name of their husbands because it's just easier. Both my sisters were ultra-feminists...
So yes, creating a new name is stupid! Choose the father's OR the mother's name, but don't make one up. Taking a husband's/wife's name doesn't require a legal name change... but creating a new name does. Why would anyone want to go through so many hoops? The answer... because they are uptight twits!
EXCEPTION: If your husband's name is Gaylord Focker and your name is Martha, you should seriously consider the name change option.
Everyone should change their name to spadanuta.
I wouldve been one of those people with a funny hyphonated name if adam and id done that. brock-lee. i always found that amusing
I always thought the thing that makes the most sense would be for each person to keep their own last name. Female offspring get the mom's surname, boys get the father's. You'd end up with male surnames and female surnames, but I don't really see the downside to that. It might be kind of cool.
what if you have only boys or only girls, though? wouldn't the person whose name doesn't get passed down feel slighted, maybe?
Yeah, but I don't see how it's any worse than the status quo.
I suppose you could alternate names -- one for even-numbered children, another for odd -- but that seems arbitrary to me. I can't imagine it catching on.
Well, the tradition in the Hispanic countries is that the wife keeps his last name but adds a "de xxxx" to it and the kids get both last names (but the father's goes first and it's the one you really use). The "de xxxx" is optional in fact and most women don't really use it. We are always surprised by the dissapearance of married women's names in the USA (also by the stereotype of the long hispanic names. Nobody uses them anymore, only in Hollywood movies)
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