When Bad Names

When Bad Names Happen to Good People When we got married in 1970 my wife changed her last name to match mine. A couple of years later she changed her name back to her family name. When we had our daughter we chickened out -- we hyphenated -- and our daughter’s last name was constructed as: ‘my wife’s sevenletterfamilyname hyphen my sevenletterfamilyname.’ Accordingly, a couple of years later our son received the same treatment. At the time it seemed like I came out ahead -- sort of like having the last word. Turned out, as time passed and school email systems dictated usernames, the name after the hyphen essentially disappeared, at least in cyberspace. But I digress. Having a name that was 14 letters plus a hyphen was a bit burdensome for the kids. They intuitively shortened it for writing purposes to S-D. This soon became their spoken school surname. It was pronounced ‘Esdee’ -- equal emphasis on each syllable. It also made for some strange realizations. I had my last name, my wife had her last name, and the two of them shared a last name. For people outside of this fractured world our collective name became the hyphenated name, pluralized. Or, economically, the Esdees. Because they had two last names, and a first name, we chose not to give the kids middle names. My wife and I were taken with one of the subplots from the movie ‘A Thousand Clowns’ in which the young lead was given until his 13th birthday to choose a first name. We told our kids they had the same deal with their middle names. Neither chose to add one. When our son turned 25 we reviewed this history and he insisted that he had, in fact, chosen a middle name. It was Mordecai. And furthermore, he claimed, he would prefer to be known by that name henceforth. Pay no attention to the revisionist kidder. Our children have been lucky in love. Our son found his soul mate early in the sophomore year of college. After a few years they decided to marry. By then our daughter was pretty serious with a medical school classmate -- serious enough to have negotiated a few items of mutual interest that resulted in her planning to take his last name, were they to marry. Armed with the information that his sister was ditching the hyphen (and what was on either side of it, at least as a surname) our son despaired a future in which he would be the only person on the planet bearing his unique configuration of letters and punctuation. At this, he implored his betrothed to take his last name and, as it was told to us later, ‘join his team.’ In an apparent act of unselfish love and generosity, and to our great amazement, and to the amazement of pretty much anyone I’ve shared this story with -she did. Sort of. Our creative and resourceful daughter-in-law found yet another way to split a hair. She appended ‘my wife’s sevenletterfamilyname hyphen my sevenletterfamilyname’ to her family name (separated by a space) and calls the entire assemblage her last name. I guess you could debate whether through this maneuver she truly joined my son’s team. I’m not going there. They’re very happy and that’s all that matters.

Stan Dolberg [email protected]

So, from the machinations of the daughter-in-law to the birth daughter. When our daughter married, she adopted as a last name the lovely, but lonely, two syllable family name her husband had used since birth. Lucky thing she never took us up on the offer of choosing a middle name. In her new incarnation her first name is followed by a space, then what used to be her hyphenated last name, then a space and her new last name. When she abbreviates the hyphenated middle/last name the S and D end up as S.-D. According to her, abbreviations require periods and that’s that. As our daughter-in-law also has a bona fide middle name, she now has one first name, one middle name and three last names (counting the hyphenated last name as two -- a point of some debate within the clan). Our daughter has a mere four names to distinguish her in the world. Unless you count the prefix ‘Doctor’ that she earned along the way. The lengths some people will go to achieve uniqueness. Today I went to my ear nose and throat doctor for help with a sinus infection. While I was waiting in the examination room I was charting his academic exploits through his wall of diplomas and noticed that some of the documents had a compound last name and some did not. When I asked him about it he told me that in fact he used to have a hyphenated name, but no longer. He legally dropped the first part it. Why? ‘No one could remember my last name. The shorter the better.’ Period.

Stan Dolberg [email protected]