New naming fad?Follow

I see that fairly common in the military. Hubby's name is Ray but lots of people called him "Stan", a truncation of our last name.

I hadn't either before I was introduced to one of these young women here at work. As we shook hands she said "I go by Loomis" (her last name). Then last week, we had introductions in the college course I'm taking. This is a grad level course so most of the folks are mid-twentish. Two of the women asked to be referred to by their surnames (Boyd and Barrett). One of these was hyphenated with her married name, but she only used one part of it for a common name.

Ya know that, I think, is what caught my attention. All three had specifically 'asked' to be referred to by these last names.

I didn't know if maybe it was, perhaps, to remove the female sounding cognomen from the business/academic world.

I had a college professor named Paul Roscoe. He went by "Jim".

Nexa

There was an article on this in Slate some months back. Apparently this is a trend started by feminists to over-throw our modern patriarchal society by demonstrating a supposedly more even handed approach towards the norm in typical last-naming conventions.

/shrugs

Meh. Like garbage collectors or enviromental sanitation engineers, both ideas stink at the end of the day.

Totem

Me either. And I would never ask to be called by my last name.

Yeah, seems a bit contrived.

Oh, well.

Joanark!

It's totally feminist.

Oh Rouen, tu seras donc ma dernière demeure?

Rouen, Rouen, j'ai grand peur que tu n'aies à souffrir de ma mort!

Whatcho talkin' 'bout her derriere for, man? Nads is a kept woman. Dude'll kill you for less.

Totem

20-odd years ago, after a disasttous gig in that beautiful City, Me and our lead singer wrote a song called "The Road to Rouen".

Last year, fluffy-faced brit-pop scampsters "Supergrass" recorded an album there called "The Road to Rouen".

Apart from the fact that our song was *****, I call that plagiarism.

As for the surname-on-marriage thing, I like the hyphenated solution.

That is a bit of a problem for applying to the children though, because the third generation is going to end up with hyphenated surnames that are four words long. Obviously unweildy and unworkable. Surnames have to dropped somewhere along the process. But I don't like the automatic taking of the male's surname either.

I rather like the idea of partner hyphenating each other's names, and when you name the children, you give them a hybrid surname of the two parents. If you follow a fairly consistent rule of giving female children the first half of the mother's original surname with the second half of the father's original surname, and give male children the first half of the father's original surname with the second half of the mother's original surname, you actually wind up, if you follow some examples down a few generations, with it all working out so that there are very neatly surviving Matrilineal names and Patrilineal names within surnames.

You have to write it all down in a family-tree graphic to actually see the neat keeping of matrilineal and patrilineal names, and how generations of boys and girls have same surname parts that trace up and down all the generations to their umpteenth grandparents and umpteenth grandchildren, but it does work out neatly, especially if you give yourself permission to tweak exactly how you hybridise the two halves of the surnames.