I think it's cool that on the internet you get to choose your own name. While I definitely prefer to go by "Roger" than "Starcross" in real life, I do think it's interesting that in one particular area, you get to pick a name for yourself, rather than having it given to you and that name can be anything you like, rather than being chosen from a list of traditional names (I know that a lot of countries you can call your kids anything, but I imagine nearly everyone here has a name that's been used as a name for generations)
We already have social security numbers in the US. We don't need another stupid number to remember. Not to mention the shitstorm the fundies would stir up about it being the Mark of the Beast or something.
The problem with SSN's is that the system is designed for the number to be confidential. That's a fatal flaw. You never mix identification and authorization. For authorization, an easily changeable private-public key would be much more sensible. Encode it on the ID card if you want to be fancy. Then swipe/tab your card instead of that ludicrous signature based authorization we currently use.
Back to the naming topic: if you want to think of it this way, yes it's like an SSN. But an SSN you want your friends and business associates to know. You'd put it on your business card and it would result in no security issues because it's only ID, not authorization.
Casual names should be like avatars. Choose and change at will. It wouldn't affect any "offical ID" processes.
I do think it will be interesting to see where online handles evolve in the coming decades, as more and more people choose a name more often than not completely divorced from their legal name. Hell, we've already heard from people in this thread that go by their handle in real life in some social circles.
Whoever I end up marrying, I'm changing my last name to hers. And I'm definitely not naming my kid a Jr in this credit rating focused society we have now.
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lonelyahavaCall me Ahava ~~She/Her~~Move to New ZealandRegistered Userregular
edited December 2010
see.... Online handles and the reasoning behind them is a thread I've been wanting to start for a while now. Mostly because I'm curious and I can't possibly imagine that devolving into a shit storm.
Mine is actually a combination of 2 roleplay characters i played long back when.
I go by Ahava. I will answer to Ahava (or Hava, or Havs) if I'm in a circle of people who know me by that name (like at PAX). But i can't get people in my real life to call me that. They all call me sarah, or some other derivative of my full name.
Ahava is hebrew, it's actually the verb "to love" but conjugating it gets complicated and just doesn't sound as pretty.
Recently, I've started (at least on Wordpres) going under the pseudonym of 'ahlterra' which is the name of the fantasy world that i write about in Nanowrimo.
But that gets into naming conventions and reasons that I don't think this thread is about at all....
I'd love bar codes just to see the paranoid folks flipout.
With technology getting smaller and cheaper I wouldn't be surprised to see people walking around with implanted chips (or whatever) that act as their multi functional ID (birth certificate, credit/debit card, etc) in my life time.
So ELM, are you seriously suggesting we should have seven-word-long names that incorporate specific modifiers to indicate profession and personalty and the like, or are you just kidding? Because that is pretty much the most horrible naming system I've ever heard.
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.
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.
We have a way to do that.
It's called having your name legally changed.
Or taking your mothers name.
Pretty sure both are 100% legit and legal without making your name sound like J.R.R. Tolkien vomited on your birth certificate.
Encore: There's a good reason no one uses ICQ anymore/
Because it's easier to message TheMuffinMan (or "Mike") than 47584578.
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lonelyahavaCall me Ahava ~~She/Her~~Move to New ZealandRegistered Userregular
edited December 2010
Screw that. I still remember my ICQ number.
so long as I have a full number pad to type it in on. But looking at the numbers on the top of the keyboard it's a bit tough.. 49259048. HAH! and I haven't used Q in like.... 8 years at least.
HonkHonk is this poster.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
edited December 2010
Over in Borkistan we have personal ID numbers. So my name is Honk Borkalot, but simultaneously I am xxxxxx-xxxx.
So in the example of the degree mill above, they would have that totally unique number which would make it easy to track me down if I was into buying fake degrees. I thought that was how SSN's worked as well.
Hell, every time I buy stuff at the grocery store and choose to sign the receipt instead of inputing pin code I have to write that number there. It's used for absolutely everything.
I just decided that my name was X and make everyone call me X or an equally rare or unique nickname to ensure that I don't get confused with the millions of people that share my first name or a variant thereof.
I mean, this is why we HAVE nicknames.
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Alfred J. Kwakis it because you were insultedwhen I insulted your hair?Registered Userregular
edited December 2010
From the OP's example: Diziet Sma
- Diziet is her given name. This is chosen by a parent, usually the mother.
- Sma is her surname, usually taken from one's mother.
that's not radically different from how we handle this today
I think it would be fine to have both first and last names be made up. I don't really care about preserving lineage in a name; it should be obvious looking at me that I'm of Nordic stock, and I don't make a habit of eating Lutefisk or raping Irish nuns anyway so it doesn't matter.
I have a seven-digit UIN that starts with a 1, and that makes me cooler than everyone else. (Except for the bastards with six digits.)
And yeah, the SSN is a pretty horrible system - in effect, it's both the user name and the password. I've heard horror stories about people having stuff ordered in their name just by someone else knowing their SSN.
The Swedish system has ten digits - six that are your date of birth (YYMMDD), a serial number of three digits (...which gives duplicate numbers if more than 1000 kids are born on the same day, but I dunno if that actually happens since we're a tiny country), and then one last checksum digit. Before 1990 the three serial digits were a code for the county/area a person was born in.
There's not much you can do with it if you know my number. It's frequently used to log in on medical sites together with a password; I can go to various government agency sites and order paper forms by entering my number and then having it snailmailed to the address they have on file, &c.
AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
edited December 2010
Just from dealing with things like medical records, people and cultures that put a lot of stock in their various ancestries are a bitch to deal with in terms of accurately finding a history of their treatment.
Sometimes people will be checked in as "Antonio Garza," sometimes "Antonio Villareal," sometimes "Antonio Jose Garza y Villareal," sometimes "Jose Antonio . . . ."
You get it.
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KageraImitating the worst people. Since 2004Registered Userregular
edited December 2010
I tried to remake myself at my new job by calling myself Dre.
Management wasn't having it. But there are like 4 other people with my name there already and they took all the regular shortened versions of my name.
Anyway I think at 18 or whatever year of majority agreed upon a person should be able to choose a new name for themselves, to promote independence.
Kagera on
My neck, my back, my FUPA and my crack.
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lonelyahavaCall me Ahava ~~She/Her~~Move to New ZealandRegistered Userregular
I tried to remake myself at my new job by calling myself Dre.
One of my best friends actually succeeded in doing that. There were so many Shawn/Shaun/Sean's at the place that he worked, that he told everybody to call him 'Nathan'.
And now, that's how everybody knows him as, Nathan. Including his boyfriend. Calls him Nathan. I still call him Shaun cause otherwise it's just too weird for me...
I prefer to go by Tony rather than my given name. Most of the work I do is over the phone, and too many people react negatively to hearing my foreign-ish name. I don't even have an accent. So at work and with work friends I am Tony, and everywhere else i'm my given name.
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.
...why?
I mean, if you think your name is somehow unfair, just change it.
What is so important about ancestry anyway?
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Mojo_JojoWe are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourseRegistered Userregular
edited December 2010
I know a few people who have unofficially changed their name. Not to the extent where they have popped down to the council and had a piece of paper made, but enough that they have various licenses and accounts made up in their chosen name.
Take Zowie Bowie for example. Poor fucker. Now he's Duncan Jones. Simple.
Actually, I've accidentally set up another identity for myself because a guy misheard me while I was making an account. so now I can merrily go by Thomas if I like, as I have a series of utility bills in that name.
Perhaps if and when I get around to claiming my second passport (I found out I was eligible for a South African one a few months back) I'll use the family name that didn't get passed to me for various boring reasons rather than my current middle name. Then I'll keep it in a train locker with Rand, Euros and Pounds. Just in case.
Mojo_Jojo on
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
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KageraImitating the worst people. Since 2004Registered Userregular
I tried to remake myself at my new job by calling myself Dre.
One of my best friends actually succeeded in doing that. There were so many Shawn/Shaun/Sean's at the place that he worked, that he told everybody to call him 'Nathan'.
And now, that's how everybody knows him as, Nathan. Including his boyfriend. Calls him Nathan. I still call him Shaun cause otherwise it's just too weird for me...
My brother's name is Matt to anyone who met him before he went off to college, and John to anyone who met him after (Matthew is his middle name and John is his first). Of course, now I'm friends with his college friends too, so what I call him is context-dependent. It was hard to keep straight at first, but now I hardly make a mistake.
I think it would be fine to have both first and last names be made up. I don't really care about preserving lineage in a name; it should be obvious looking at me that I'm of Nordic stock, and I don't make a habit of eating Lutefisk or raping Irish nuns anyway so it doesn't matter.
There are a lot of benefits to having every person in an immediate family sharing a surname, so it makes sense for kids to take on their parents' name at least until they hit independence.
ElJeffe on
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
My middle name is Eugene (ugh), but since I was like, 10 or so, I've always told people that it's Edward. I've never done anything official about it (I mean, the initial is the same), but hell, most of the time I think it's Edward anyway since I've been saying it for so long.
I have a lot of friends that I've met online who I now know in real life who call me Murphy. I'm fine with that. Since my family and I aren't at all close, and I've always sort of hated my last name anyway, I've been tempted at times to officially change it to Murphy. That or just something else in my family tree that doesn't sound as silly as my current last name.
I've actually been starting the paperwork to change my last name. I was just going to say 'fuck it' and change it to Fyrewulff so that I could get away from people violating my credit AND get a perpetual natural trademark to my name into eternity. I don't truly care what my last name is, but it just needs to be completely unique. Can't change it to a known last name because of the implications. Can't change it to the last name of my mom/stepdad because there's a registered Level 3 sex offender in Omaha that would match with mostly the same name.
When people ask me why I don't just go with a less screename-y version like Wulff, I point out to them that it's an actual last name already.
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lonelyahavaCall me Ahava ~~She/Her~~Move to New ZealandRegistered Userregular
edited December 2010
My current surname is a character from Seinfeld. The tall, obnoxious, lanky one. With the crazy hair.
now imagine having that last name and going through high school in the late 90's.
Got it?
Yeah, now you guys can see why I don't want to necessarily keep it, and am not particularly close to it. Honestly, if I were to take any last name other than my husband's, I would probably go back to my mother's maiden name.
But that's just silly as far as I'm concerned, since I like my boyfriend's last name.
But I have an online name "Ahava" which growing up became a pen name for my writing *shrugs*
Only reason I didn't ask for the name change thread to be named 'Ahava' as opposed to the instinctual 'lonelyahava' is that i'm terrified of Tube's dice.
Posts
The problem with SSN's is that the system is designed for the number to be confidential. That's a fatal flaw. You never mix identification and authorization. For authorization, an easily changeable private-public key would be much more sensible. Encode it on the ID card if you want to be fancy. Then swipe/tab your card instead of that ludicrous signature based authorization we currently use.
Back to the naming topic: if you want to think of it this way, yes it's like an SSN. But an SSN you want your friends and business associates to know. You'd put it on your business card and it would result in no security issues because it's only ID, not authorization.
Casual names should be like avatars. Choose and change at will. It wouldn't affect any "offical ID" processes.
Mine is actually a combination of 2 roleplay characters i played long back when.
I go by Ahava. I will answer to Ahava (or Hava, or Havs) if I'm in a circle of people who know me by that name (like at PAX). But i can't get people in my real life to call me that. They all call me sarah, or some other derivative of my full name.
Ahava is hebrew, it's actually the verb "to love" but conjugating it gets complicated and just doesn't sound as pretty.
Recently, I've started (at least on Wordpres) going under the pseudonym of 'ahlterra' which is the name of the fantasy world that i write about in Nanowrimo.
But that gets into naming conventions and reasons that I don't think this thread is about at all....
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With technology getting smaller and cheaper I wouldn't be surprised to see people walking around with implanted chips (or whatever) that act as their multi functional ID (birth certificate, credit/debit card, etc) in my life time.
We have a way to do that.
It's called having your name legally changed.
Or taking your mothers name.
Pretty sure both are 100% legit and legal without making your name sound like J.R.R. Tolkien vomited on your birth certificate.
Encore: There's a good reason no one uses ICQ anymore/
Because it's easier to message TheMuffinMan (or "Mike") than 47584578.
so long as I have a full number pad to type it in on. But looking at the numbers on the top of the keyboard it's a bit tough.. 49259048. HAH! and I haven't used Q in like.... 8 years at least.
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So in the example of the degree mill above, they would have that totally unique number which would make it easy to track me down if I was into buying fake degrees. I thought that was how SSN's worked as well.
Hell, every time I buy stuff at the grocery store and choose to sign the receipt instead of inputing pin code I have to write that number there. It's used for absolutely everything.
:^:
I mean, this is why we HAVE nicknames.
- Diziet is her given name. This is chosen by a parent, usually the mother.
- Sma is her surname, usually taken from one's mother.
that's not radically different from how we handle this today
I have a seven-digit UIN that starts with a 1, and that makes me cooler than everyone else. (Except for the bastards with six digits.)
And yeah, the SSN is a pretty horrible system - in effect, it's both the user name and the password. I've heard horror stories about people having stuff ordered in their name just by someone else knowing their SSN.
The Swedish system has ten digits - six that are your date of birth (YYMMDD), a serial number of three digits (...which gives duplicate numbers if more than 1000 kids are born on the same day, but I dunno if that actually happens since we're a tiny country), and then one last checksum digit. Before 1990 the three serial digits were a code for the county/area a person was born in.
There's not much you can do with it if you know my number. It's frequently used to log in on medical sites together with a password; I can go to various government agency sites and order paper forms by entering my number and then having it snailmailed to the address they have on file, &c.
Sometimes people will be checked in as "Antonio Garza," sometimes "Antonio Villareal," sometimes "Antonio Jose Garza y Villareal," sometimes "Jose Antonio . . . ."
You get it.
Management wasn't having it. But there are like 4 other people with my name there already and they took all the regular shortened versions of my name.
Anyway I think at 18 or whatever year of majority agreed upon a person should be able to choose a new name for themselves, to promote independence.
One of my best friends actually succeeded in doing that. There were so many Shawn/Shaun/Sean's at the place that he worked, that he told everybody to call him 'Nathan'.
And now, that's how everybody knows him as, Nathan. Including his boyfriend. Calls him Nathan. I still call him Shaun cause otherwise it's just too weird for me...
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Works for me.
Also let them rewrite their genetic code since they didn't ask for it, man!
On the black screen
Roger and Marriweather?
Rogeather or Marriger.
Simple enough.
As a counterpoint: that's how I got my XBL tag: AceOfDeebaser.
...why?
I mean, if you think your name is somehow unfair, just change it.
What is so important about ancestry anyway?
Take Zowie Bowie for example. Poor fucker. Now he's Duncan Jones. Simple.
Actually, I've accidentally set up another identity for myself because a guy misheard me while I was making an account. so now I can merrily go by Thomas if I like, as I have a series of utility bills in that name.
Perhaps if and when I get around to claiming my second passport (I found out I was eligible for a South African one a few months back) I'll use the family name that didn't get passed to me for various boring reasons rather than my current middle name. Then I'll keep it in a train locker with Rand, Euros and Pounds. Just in case.
That's...a little more complicated...
Can anyone guess my name? My surname will be tricky.
I don't even know what supplanted means to be honest.
Anyway, the letters in my username are my initials.
Jacob Alex something something.
Completely stuck on that last name.
My brother's name is Matt to anyone who met him before he went off to college, and John to anyone who met him after (Matthew is his middle name and John is his first). Of course, now I'm friends with his college friends too, so what I call him is context-dependent. It was hard to keep straight at first, but now I hardly make a mistake.
James Alexander Knighton
Knight is derived from the original cnicht, which meant servant. My actual surname comes from the real town of Knighton. So, servant-town.
obsolete signature form
replaced by JPEGs.
There are a lot of benefits to having every person in an immediate family sharing a surname, so it makes sense for kids to take on their parents' name at least until they hit independence.
I have a lot of friends that I've met online who I now know in real life who call me Murphy. I'm fine with that. Since my family and I aren't at all close, and I've always sort of hated my last name anyway, I've been tempted at times to officially change it to Murphy. That or just something else in my family tree that doesn't sound as silly as my current last name.
When people ask me why I don't just go with a less screename-y version like Wulff, I point out to them that it's an actual last name already.
now imagine having that last name and going through high school in the late 90's.
Got it?
Yeah, now you guys can see why I don't want to necessarily keep it, and am not particularly close to it. Honestly, if I were to take any last name other than my husband's, I would probably go back to my mother's maiden name.
But that's just silly as far as I'm concerned, since I like my boyfriend's last name.
But I have an online name "Ahava" which growing up became a pen name for my writing *shrugs*
Only reason I didn't ask for the name change thread to be named 'Ahava' as opposed to the instinctual 'lonelyahava' is that i'm terrified of Tube's dice.
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