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Should we revamp how we name ourselves?
electricitylikesme
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So I don't like how we currently assign names to ourselves. In a society moving towards equality, it doesn't strike me as particularly consistent or practical.
I feel there has to be a better way, but I don't know what it should be, or how it should work.
To be clear: "Firstname Lastname" nomenclature seems fundamentally inefficient. Indications of heritage only propagate from one parent at best. No matter how you roll it, you can't contain a decent history in there or a fair appraisal of one's formative influences.
I don't like this. At the very least I think both parent's should get a fair representation in the name, without deferrence to either and without encumbering the name with hyphenation. Some type of phonetics arrangements which kind of naturally mutates would be ideal, but what should this be?
As a motivator for discussion, I present an example of how The Culture does names for biological citizens, although there's the obvious issue that in our world you can't switch sex at will and the social expectation isn't for every adult to have 1 child during their 400 years of life:
So, D&D'ers - what do you think. How do we choose our names such that we give fair deference to the genetic parentage of someone, their own personality, their formative experience, or significant influences? And how do we do it in a way which is sustainable over multiple generations of names?
I feel there has to be a better way, but I don't know what it should be, or how it should work.
To be clear: "Firstname Lastname" nomenclature seems fundamentally inefficient. Indications of heritage only propagate from one parent at best. No matter how you roll it, you can't contain a decent history in there or a fair appraisal of one's formative influences.
I don't like this. At the very least I think both parent's should get a fair representation in the name, without deferrence to either and without encumbering the name with hyphenation. Some type of phonetics arrangements which kind of naturally mutates would be ideal, but what should this be?
As a motivator for discussion, I present an example of how The Culture does names for biological citizens, although there's the obvious issue that in our world you can't switch sex at will and the social expectation isn't for every adult to have 1 child during their 400 years of life:
Some humanoid or drone Culture citizens have long names, often with seven or more words. Some of these words specify the citizen's origin (place of birth or manufacture), some an occupation, and some (chosen later in life by the citizen themselves) may denote specific philosophical or political alignments, or make other similarly personal statements. An example would be Diziet Sma whose full name is Rasd-Coduresa Diziet Embless Sma da' Marenhide:
- Rasd-Coduresa is the planetary system of her birth, and the specific object (planet, orbital, Dyson sphere, etc.). The '-sa' suffix is roughly equivalent to '-er' in English. By this convention, Earth humans would all be named Sol-Terrasa (or Sun-Earther).
- Diziet is her given name. This is chosen by a parent, usually the mother.
- Embless is her chosen name. Most Culture citizens choose this when they reach adulthood (according to The Player of Games this is known as "completing one's name"). As with all conventions in the Culture, it may be broken or ignored: some change their chosen name during their lives, some never take one.
- Sma is her surname, usually taken from one's mother.
- da' Marenhide is the 'house'/estate she was raised within, the 'da' or 'dam' being similar to 'von' in German.
- Iain Banks has given his own Culture name as "Sun-Earther Iain El-Bonko Banks of Queensferry"
So, D&D'ers - what do you think. How do we choose our names such that we give fair deference to the genetic parentage of someone, their own personality, their formative experience, or significant influences? And how do we do it in a way which is sustainable over multiple generations of names?
electricitylikesme on
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When names are used, dealing with large groups of people named Mohammed, Singh, or Kaur is always a bit of a pain.
Dunno how it works elsewhere, but you can't legally change your name however you want here in Sweden. It needs to be accepted by bureaucracy first, and they deny anything too outlandish.
It's not really a pain, but it is hella confusing.
I like to work backwards from perfection to see how we can get there.
But it's a vexing problem.
This would actually be pretty god damn awesome, but I suspect that without implantable cellphones it wouldn't grab.
Although it does make me wonder if you could recode IPv6 into base-36 and get phonetically pronounceable names.
But I think with the internet, and rap culture
Most of us choose to use the name our parents gave us. Most of our parents were old school and gave us our dad's last name, and some sort of gender-appropriate first name. Girl children get crazy names with funky spelling. Boys get run-of-the-mill names, usually biblical (John, Paul, etc.. I don't know the bible very well).
But yea on WoW, and here, I'm Loklar. My best friend uses a stylized version of my name. And at work I use my government name. It seems to work out okay.
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I don't think it's necessarily a good thing that everyone would have a "unique" name. Often people with unique names are easier to track down by the media and by government workers. If you start looking for "John Smith" on facebook, you won't get any leads. But if your name is highly unusual it makes it very easy for people to find you, which is a blessing and a curse.
Which is the reason why I don't use my real name on Facebook. But I'm a little more security conscience than most.
Unless the expectation is that your legal name changes every time you change jobs or your personality changes a bit.
Like was said, the exact structure of our names isn't that important these days. Or rather, it's exactly as important as you want it to be. If you want to make your name "Robert Joseph Electrician Nee Johnson of Philadelphia," hey, go wild. If you want the more manageable "Edgar Smith," that's cool, too. (Assuming you don't live in one of the retarded places that only let you change your name to bureaucratically acceptable things, of course.) If you want your name to show off both your matrilineal and patrilineal origins, you can do that. If, like most people, you don't much care, that's fine.
tl;dr: No, we should not revamp how we name ourselves.
If you want to have a specific type of naming structure, then use it.
The cited example doesn't include profession modifiers or anything like that - all that information is reasonably fixed, and I should note, tradition rather then requirement.
The idea I'm putting forward is if we could develop a system which had a set of syllables which interacted well and mutated in a sensible way from generation to generation, or which incorporated a bunch of information which indicated ancestory in a fair way.
I'm basically arguing that we should revamp tradition to be better, even if we still end up running by nethandles or whathaveyou.
Why should my mother's family name meet a dead-end instead of my father's name, when I'd rather somehow preserve both in a consistent manner.
I've also wanted to change my last name to "Koenn" for purely personal interests. Probably won't, though.
It's not harsh at all, you're simply wrong. If someone REALLY wants to find you, they can. But there's no reason to make it easy. And particularly journalists will give up if leads go cold (because of deadlines and news cycles. They tend to find people who are easy to find.
Story behind spoiler tag:
Edit: This story is just an example. I made up the names because I couldn't remember the specifics. The newspaper story is linked in a post below, which shows that my example story spoiler'd below, is accurate.
My prof asked the US prosecutor if he could have the retrieved client list. What he got was a few hundred names of Canadians who bought phony degrees from this U.S. degree mill. Some names were common some weren't. But at this point my prof new nothing about any of these people, except that they bought a fake degree.
Now you can't just accuse someone of buying a degree. Because maybe they bought a degree AND ALSO went to school where they claimed and earned a degree. Or maybe they bought a degree and never claimed to have earned the degree from the specific institution. To find out if someone has a fake degree you have to call up the registrar's office of the school and ask if the person has a degree from there. Problem is there are 100 Joe Smiths, so you have to also know their birth-date and when they graduated. He didn't know that. So then he asked if "Axar Rare-name" had a degree from there; the school said no.
But you STILL can't accuse the guy of buying a fake degree yet. Because all you know is that Axar Rarename is on some client list of a degree mill and doesn't actually have a degree from the school. Maybe Axar just bought a degree for art, or to see how realistic it looked. So now you have to find out if Axar is using the fake degree to get jobs. So you need to find out where this guy works and what he's doing.
Again, finding out where Joe Smith works is difficult. Because you don't know anything about him. Axar though is much easier.
Turns out Axar was claiming to have a degree. Now you know he's a liar, now you know you have a story.
To write a newspaper story you need to find Axar for an interview (called an accountability interview, it's the kind where you go up to someone you think is a crook and ask them to explain themselves).
So Axar got journalists tracking them down was outed in the newspaper. And only because his name was unique.
Here's the Newspaper article in question: http://www.thestar.com/article/553330
Rest of the story in the link.
Quami Frederick was chosen because it's an extremely rare name combination. Made her easy to find.
I'm not dismissing that privacy is important (just not in this specific example). What I am saying is that if this were a case of privacy needing to be protected, the system (namespace collisions) is unreliable. Some, with common names, are protected to a degree. Others have no such protection and suffer a spill over effect from being the easiest target on the block.
Privacy has to be solved by better information security, for example encryption. Obfuscation will get you nowhere and may conceal underlying issues.
I couldn't agree more.
It's just a name.
(Yes, I know Shakespeare said it in a different context, but still.)
Little Snookums am I!
Laziness? Do you know how hard it is to actually say someone is a liar in print? If you're wrong you get sued and fired. Journalists don't have extra powers like police or lawyers do, all they have is the same tools as common citizens.
@enc0re
It's not a journalist's job to bust every single degree cheat. Dale Brazo tells stories, true stories. That's his job. Finding a few degree cheats, and telling the world that there are hundreds of others in the country is enough to tell a story.
Once you found 3 or 4 cheats, what's the point in going after more? The readers don't want to read about 100 degree cheats, they just want to read about a few and see how big of a problem it is. Tomorrow they want a new story about a different topic. If the reporter kept writing every day about new degree cheats, pretty soon people would become bored and stop reading.
It's the government's job to prosecute all the other people and haul them to court.
It was an interesting talk, though. I will probably keep my last name when I get married, its such a big part of my identity.
So what you want is to shuttle the current arbitrary tradition that nobody pays much thought to in favor of a new arbitrary tradition that nobody pays much thought to?
I mean, encoding specific information in certain syllables is a really good way to transfer information, if that's what you're seeking to do. Problem is, pretty much nobody is seeking to do so in the way you desire. To most people, a name is just that thing you use so people know who you are. Most people probably wouldn't get anything out of the new system, except now we have to worry about seven names instead of two or three.
(And you did mention occupation and political/philosophical alignments as potential naming elements.)
Also, do you really think tracking ancestry in a very public and readily apparent way is a good thing? Do we want to reestablish the importance of bloodlines? Great, 'cause I was just thinking we don't have enough ways to pigeonhole and discriminate against people. ;-)
Basically, you're offering a solution in search of a problem. The current system allows you to put whatever important bits you want into your name. You can call yourself almost anything you want (I assume things like "Fuckcock McDarkieSlayer" are not currently acceptable), so if you want to point out both your parents, just hyphenate your last name, or what have you. And do the same for your kids, if such is your desire.
It would be nice if that wasn't the case, because it's a pretty big disincentive.
My wife took mine because she really hated her own and thought mine was cool.
If I ever remarry, I would be amenable to taking the girl's name if it was a cool name, but I'm wagering that we'd also just go the traditional route, because most people don't care enough to buck tradition.
I mean, hell, chances are is that last name was giving to my family by some slaver way back in the day. As for the whole family thing? So fucking what.
C'mon, it would be fun!
And really, one of your parent's names is going to come to an end anyway, just a generation later when your child is born. Or do you intend to hyphenate two already hyphenated names? Thomas Michael Jones-Smith-Tyler-McPhee is going to get really damn unwieldy really damn fast.
This is something that a lot of Latin cultures do, at least my family anyway. My legal last name is my father's last name followed by my mother's maiden name, with a dash inbetween. When the child has their own children, their last name would be the "first" last name (my father's) followed by the mother's maiden name (or their "first" last name if they have a similar naming convention for their last name). I've always liked that, allows for the name to represent where you come from, especially for me, since my father is Chilean and my mother is from England.
Why do we need information about ancestry encoded into our names? As people have pointed out, it can get unnecessarily unwieldy very quickly. Wouldn't it be easier to just, I don't know, keep a record of it in a book or something? And it's not really critically useful information in this day and age.
I don't need to know a person's ancestry when I first meet them. What would I do with that information? "Oh, that person is descended from the Portland, Oregon branch of the McElroy clan. That's... great?"
Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus and Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus would like to have a word with you. Bring your friend Adolph Blaine Charles David Earl Frederick Jack Gerald Hubert Irvin John Kenneth Lloyd Martin Nero Oliver Paul Quincy Randolph Sherman Thomas Uncas Victor William Xerxes Yancy Zeus Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorft Senior, I think he has some say in this as well.
My father cares nothing about the last name and could care even less about the family on his father's side who gave it to him. I, personally, got fed up with my name in high school. I also like my future husband's last name very much. So, I'll be taking his name.
As for remembering family and honoring traditions...
My mother's family is from scotland, Lindsay clan to be exact (Paternal clan. Maternal clan is MacGregor). And in every generation of the family, one person has 'Lindsay' in their name. My Grandfather, My Uncle, and My cousin. And this goes back more generations as well. And, when/if I have a daughter, her middle name will be Lindsay in order to keep the family name going and to keep that connection, connected.
As for my Father's family, we're jewish. Russian/Ukranian Jews to be exact. But jewish Tradition (as I've been taught) is to name a newborn child after a recently passed loved one. Either the full name, or the initial. As a way of keeping the family name possibly in tact, but also allowing a bit of the deceased memory to continue on in the family.
That's why I was named Sarah. Because my great grandmother was very loved and my parents wanted to honor her life and love and so, here I am.
I see no reason to change any of this, or these naming traditions in my family, as they really do work for me. My boyfriend and I have talked about it, in vague futuristic terms, and we pretty much agree.
We both really like how Sarah sounds with his last name.
Democrats Abroad! || Vote From Abroad
I'm not criticizing the journalist. I'm criticizing our naming system. That degree list should have been a series of IPv6 addresses uniquely identifying the fraudsters.
with a major in Accounting
is hereby awarded to
3ffe:1900:4545:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf ("Andrew")
Would changing my name to Detharin Las Vegas 19xx Graduate of UNLV Son Of... be any better than if my name was He Who's Name is Not Spoken Under Penalty of Evisceration No Not Him the Other One?