David S. Reynolds’ NYRB review (February 22, 2024; archived) of Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature by David Anthony provides repellent instances of “hostile portraits of Jews in various realms of US culture during the two decades before the Civil War,” but I’m bringing it here for this passage:
It has been said that nineteenth-century America was mawkishly sentimental—a culture of pap and prudery against which serious authors like Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman rebelled. To some extent this was true, as evidenced by the era’s didactic novels, religious tracts, and codes of proper decorum. It was an age when Evangeline St. Clare, the angelic heroine of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best seller Uncle Tom’s Cabin, inspired millions, and when, in polite circles, undergarments were called “unmentionables,” legs “limbs,” men’s trousers “continuations,” and a trip to the bathroom “visiting Aunt Jones.”
We all know about “unmentionables” and “limbs,” and the OED confirms that use of “continuations” (though it doesn’t sound much like a euphemism: “Gaiters continuous with ‘shorts’ or knee-breeches, as worn by bishops, deans, etc. Hence in later slang, trousers, as a continuation of the waistcoat”; 1883 citation “For fear of spilling it over what a tailor would call my continuations”), but I can find nothing to back up the claim about “visiting Aunt Jones” except the footnoted source for the assertion, R.W. Holder’s How Not to Say What You Mean: A Dictionary of Euphemisms (Oxford University Press, 2007). The relevant entry in that volume reads
aunt² a lavatory
To whom many women say they are paying a
visit. In Victorian days it was their Aunt Jones.
Which sounds more like the notoriously chatty and unreliable Eric Partridge than a dependable reference work, and I can find no examples of this alleged usage in Google Books. Is anyone familiar with it?
If you will but consult the 1874 “New Edition”* of _The Slang Dictionary, Etymological, Historical, and Anecdotal_,” you will find an entry for “My aunt, AUNT JONES, or MRS. JONES**” glossed as “the closet of decency, or house of office.” Maybe no more reliable than Partridge, but certainly more contemporaneous.
*A posthumous update of the 1859 slang dictionary of John Camden Hotten, who had died in 1873.
**I’m using ALLCAPS because I can’t be bothered to figure out how to format the “small caps” font of the original.
Ah, an excellent trouvaille — many thanks! (I use this for all my small caps needs.)
I knew about Aunt Flo coming to visit, but I imagine it’s a later and independent development. Something about aunts being present, but relatively in the margins.
OK, “My Aunt, Aᴜɴᴛ Jᴏɴᴇꜱ, or Mʀꜱ. Jᴏɴᴇꜱ.” Not using the small caps for the first item in the list seems odd, but apparently that’s how they rolled typographically back in 1874.
Aunt Jones
A poor (Welsh?) relation of Cousin John and Jakes?
Nice citations in Wiktionary entries for Cousin John and jakes ! The (English) Wiktionary is really improving nicely.
(Short comment because I am on the road.)
Wiktionary is really improving nicely. — I guess, but in Ireland jacks is now far more common than jakes, and listing “outhouse” before “lavatory” in the definition of each might be taken as an insult to our plumbing standards.
Old OED entry for jakes here. I wonder, has this been updated? I can’t log on to the OED at the moment.
Yes, it was revised in 2016. First cite:
Etymology:
Thanks for that, Hat.
I wonder, could it originally have been Aunt Joan’s ? (Sc. house or the like.)
Searching for “Mrs. Jones” in the OED got this quotation, under crapping, n. (revised 2019):
This and Hotten are British sources; the book reviewer sounds like he assumed “Aunt Jones” was also in American use, but that has yet to be documented.
The 1860 edition of Hotten’s dictionary (linked from its Wikipedia page) has separate entries “MRS. JONES, the house of office, a water-closet” and “MY AUNT, a water-closet, or house of office.”
Nice citations in Wiktionary entries for Cousin John and jakes
“jakes” lead me to the entry for “Quincy” as a u.s. parallel (with an example but no citation), which i’ve never encountered but am tempted to take up, in honor of the south shore.
I’m not familiar with that sense of “Quincy” but did back in my Seventies childhood encounter a similar euphemism for the same referent, viz. “Fremont,”* which was formed on the very same pattern of surname**-of-famous-19th-century-American-with-the-first-name-John. This was a feature of the particular dialect of English spoken in Japan circa 1975 by teenage expat counselors at English-language sleepaway summer camp for gaijin kids on Shikoku. It of course may also be analyzable as a highly-localized in-joke.
*I’m not 100% sure through memory’s haze if I ever saw it written, but I very much doubt it would have been “Frémont,” although current wikipedia style seems to include a fussy insistence on foreign accent marks for the name of the fellow alluded to.
**Okay, maybe Quincy wasn’t technically JQA’s surname, but come on, man.
ᴼʰ, ʷᵉ ᶜᵃⁿ ᶠᵃᵏᵉ ˢᵘᵖᵉʳˢᶜʳⁱᵖᵗ ʰᵉʳᵉꜝ
···ⁿᵉᵃʳˡʸ·
Fun fact: I can’t see the small-caps S, but (most?) other letters are fine; my fonts are too old. 🙂
Presumably, the “house of office,” refers to this sense.
I didn’t post this before, since it seems rather gross, but I can’t escape the impression that, with this euphemism in mind, the chorus of “Me and Mrs. Jones” makes it sound like Billy Paul is having a difficult bowel movement.
Re the possibility raised upthread that “Aunt Jones” might have been a garbling/reanalysis of “Aunt Joan’s,” that seems to me like it would depend on how common phrases of the form “Aunt SURNAME” were at some relevant time period. They certainly don’t seem common (especially when contrasted with “Aunt FIRSTNAME-WITH-POSSESSIVE-MARKER”) in my own current experience but it may have been otherwise in the past.
Separately, if you look for other “Victorian” uses of “Aunt Jones” in published literary works you will inevitably come across one of the many different volumes reprinting a doggerel poem by Thackeray that contains the lines:
“Yesterday, going to Aunt
Jones’s to tea,
Mother, dear mother, I
Forgot the door-key!”
It may be important to note that while this was eventually republished on its own in collections of Thackeray’s verse, it seems to have first appeared in the midst of an early comical prose work (one of those collected in _The Fitz-Boodle Papers_), where it is presented as the work of one of the specific fictitious characters in the narrative, viz. “that unromantic brute, Van Cutsem, the Dutch Chargé-d’Affaires.” (Given the story’s setting, Van Cutsem may have supposedly written it in German, with the supposed English translation then being the supposed work of the first-person narrator, who I assume is probably Fitz-Boodle although I haven’t read enough of the context to be certain of that.)
In any event, I don’t know whether “Aunt Jones” in the bit of doggerel I quoted may have had a double meaning, but perhaps Thackeray scholars have investigated that possibility.
Don’t forget the somewhat lame Japanese joke-euphemism 音入れ室 (otoire-shitsu) or “recording room”, from a reanalysis of おトイレ (o-toire) as おと_いれ (oto-ire) “input sound”.
Perhaps “Aunt [surname]” was restricted to a parent’s married sister? A parent’s birth surname would be shared by all their unmarried sisters and the wives of their brothers.
(Sᴍᴀʟʟ ᴄᴀᴘꜱ, ᴇʜ?)
‘All right,’ said Susan. ‘I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.’
Rᴇᴀʟʟʏ? Aꜱ ɪꜰ ɪᴛ ᴡᴀꜱ ꜱᴏᴍᴇ ᴋɪɴᴅ ᴏꜰ ᴘɪɴᴋ ᴘɪʟʟ? Nᴏ. Hᴜᴍᴀɴꜱ ɴᴇᴇᴅ ꜰᴀɴᴛᴀꜱʏ ᴛᴏ ʙᴇ ʜᴜᴍᴀɴ. Tᴏ ʙᴇ ᴛʜᴇ ᴘʟᴀᴄᴇ ᴡʜᴇʀᴇ ᴛʜᴇ ꜰᴀʟʟɪɴɢ ᴀɴɢᴇʟ ᴍᴇᴇᴛꜱ ᴛʜᴇ ʀɪꜱɪɴɢ ᴀᴘᴇ.
‘Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little-‘
Yᴇꜱ. Aꜱ ᴘʀᴀᴄᴛɪᴄᴇ. Yᴏᴜ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ᴛᴏ ꜱᴛᴀʀᴛ ᴏᴜᴛ ʟᴇᴀʀɴɪɴɢ ᴛᴏ ʙᴇʟɪᴇᴠᴇ ᴛʜᴇ ʟɪᴛᴛʟᴇ ʟɪᴇꜱ.
‘So we can believe the big ones?’
Yᴇꜱ. Jᴜꜱᴛɪᴄᴇ. Mᴇʀᴄʏ. Dᴜᴛʏ. Tʜᴀᴛ ꜱᴏʀᴛ ᴏꜰ ᴛʜɪɴɢ.
‘They’re not the same at all!’
Yᴏᴜ ᴛʜɪɴᴋ ꜱᴏ? Tʜᴇɴ ᴛᴀᴋᴇ ᴛʜᴇ ᴜɴɪᴠᴇʀꜱᴇ ᴀɴᴅ ɢʀɪɴᴅ ɪᴛ ᴅᴏᴡɴ ᴛᴏ ᴛʜᴇ ꜰɪɴᴇꜱᴛ ᴘᴏᴡᴅᴇʀ ᴀɴᴅ ꜱɪᴇᴠᴇ ɪᴛ ᴛʜʀᴏᴜɢʜ ᴛʜᴇ ꜰɪɴᴇꜱᴛ ꜱɪᴇᴠᴇ ᴀɴᴅ ᴛʜᴇɴ ꜱʜᴏᴡ ᴍᴇ ᴏɴᴇ ᴀᴛᴏᴍ ᴏꜰ ᴊᴜꜱᴛɪᴄᴇ, ᴏɴᴇ ᴍᴏʟᴇᴄᴜʟᴇ ᴏꜰ ᴍᴇʀᴄʏ. Aɴᴅ ʏᴇᴛ– Death waved a hand. Aɴᴅ ʏᴇᴛ ʏᴏᴜ ᴀᴄᴛ ᴀꜱ ɪꜰ ᴛʜᴇʀᴇ ɪꜱ ꜱᴏᴍᴇ ɪᴅᴇᴀʟ ᴏʀᴅᴇʀ ɪɴ ᴛʜᴇ ᴡᴏʀʟᴅ, ᴀꜱ ɪꜰ ᴛʜᴇʀᴇ ɪꜱ ꜱᴏᴍᴇ&#𝟪𝟤𝟥𝟢; ꜱᴏᴍᴇ ʀɪɢʜᴛɴᴇꜱꜱ ɪɴ ᴛʜᴇ ᴜɴɪᴠᴇʀꜱᴇ ʙʏ ᴡʜɪᴄʜ ɪᴛ ᴍᴀʏ ʙᴇ ᴊᴜᴅɢᴇᴅ.
‘Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—‘
Mʏ ᴘᴏɪɴᴛ ᴇxᴀᴄᴛʟʏ.
Hogfather, IIRC? Death talking to Susan?
Death’s argument does not seem very compelling. After all, if you subject the universe to the process they propose, you will also not find an atom or molecule of shoes or ships or sealing-wax, nor of cabbages or kings*: all things generally held to exist by many who are not particularly given to fantasy.
Mind you, I suppose Death would be a reductionist.
* One might argue about kings. But cabbages are, alas, Brute Fact at its most brutal. And, of course, more durable than
kingsPrime Ministers. (On reflection, that was lettuce. Political commentary is hard. Yet is not cabbage more durable than lettuce? QED.)“Are cabbages more durable than kings?”
“In principle yes; but it wasn’t a cabbage, it was a head of lettuce, and it wasn’t a king, it was a prime minister…”
Death’s argument does not seem very compelling. After all, if you subject the universe to the process they propose, you will also not find an atom or molecule of shoes or ships or sealing-wax, nor of cabbages or kings*: all things generally held to exist by many who are not particularly given to fantasy.
And Death would be out of a job.
Hm. Is Death made of atoms?
ETA: This brings up back to Housman, “The Immortal Part”.
@David Eddyshaw: Death is being rhetorical there, and actually criticizing reductionism. His point (which he only seems to be comfortable explaining didactically to Susan, since she is his granddaughter) is that belief people need to believe stories to understand the world. Justice and mercy are real things, but they are human* things that only exist because people’s beliefs give them meaning.
Death also makes it clear, earlier in Hogfather, that he is not interested in preserving stories if they hurt actual people. He, as Death, is supposed to claim the life of “The Little Match Girl,” but he does something different instead.
* And elf, dwarf, troll, etc. in the setting.
Dwarves and trolls, arguably yes. But elves, in Discworld, could arguably be what happens when people don’t believe in justice or mercy or duty.
Hm. Could Teatime be part elf?
@Brett:
I am unfamiliar with the Pratchett canon. I did have a go at one of his works, The Wee Free Men, but gave up not very far in. My children tell me it’s one of the weaker novels, and I should try another.
I am reassured to hear that Death is not, in fact, a reductionist. One naturally prefers powerful elemental powers to have a bit of epistemological sophistication (though I am OK with them not playing chess.)
In the excellent Diana Wynne Jones’ The Merlin Conspiracy, the heroine, Arianrhod, also turns out to be Death’s granddaughter.* (I also appreciated the way that Wynne Jones makes it clear that Arianrhod is made very uncomfortable by the unrequited crush that the – perfectly nice – male lead has on her.)
*Death is naturally Welsh.
Adding “Jones, Diana Wynne” to my list of people subject to “wait, which of those names is the surname?” I thought Wikipedia would have a system for answering that question, but it doesn’t; usually you have to infer it from how the name is used in the article, and inevitably that’s often inconsistent. Instead I trust library catalogs and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Speaking of Welsh, Jones has written about her brief wartime evacuation to her grandparents in Wales, where her grandfather was a famous preacher and chapel was “hours of solid Welsh”; but she didn’t stay long enough to acquire the language, only a Welsh accent, which offended her English mother.
@David Eddyshaw: I would imagine there were a lot of influences back and forth between Diana Wynne Jones and Terry Pratchett.
I confess I hadn’t heard of Diana Wynne Jones before, but the excerpt from her autobiography that ktschwarz mentioned was fascinating. Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons books were very popular in the group of children that included me. Something that never occurred to me at the time, when I thought a “tit” was a kind of common bird, but occurs to me very strongly now, is that “Titty” was a very odd name to give a girl in a book. Did the colloquial meaning not exist in England when the books were written?
One wonders what the exact relationship between tit and teat is. German Zitze is obviously cognate with the former, but means the latter and doesn’t ever seem to have been extended to humans.
OED says on teat, including earlier variants spelled with an e or such:
(I don’t see any “forms with e cited at that entry”.)
The earliest citation for teat is tæt, in the ca. 1200 AD MS of the Old English translation of the Herbarium of Pseudo-Apuleius (MS Harley 6258B). The ca. 900 AD version gives tit.
I find it fascinating that Athel Cornish-Bowden has not heard of Diana Wynne Jones. How gender-segregated _was_ Britain? She was just nine years older than you.
Why pick on Athel Cornish-Bowden? I’d never heard of Diana Wynne Jones either, and I imagine that’s true of most people. She’s pretty much the definition of a niche author.
I’m not picking on him, I’m just baffled. She’s not a niche author in any way, whatever that means.
It means she’s an author known to a niche readership (in this case, sf/fantasy fans), not the general readership that buys books on the NY Times best-seller list, Booker Prize winners, etc.
And the fact that I, an sf fan (though not au courant with the current field), had never heard of her should tell you something.
She’s been mentioned here a couple times before.
Heh. Well, clearly the name went in one eye and out the other because it meant nothing to me! I’ll probably register it now, though.
The one with a similar name I know is Alun Wyn Jones, formerly from the Welsh national rugby side. There is now another Welsh rugby player, who is also a Wyn Jones.
She’s really not an sf author, and not really a fantasy author in the way that I think you mean – she was a fairly mainstream (and pretty well known) children’s author, although she did write a handful of more adult books. The first book I ever read of hers, aged about 10, was borrowed from a friend who wasn’t a fantasy fan in any specific way.
I’m not sure why her being 9 years older than you would make you more likely to know her, though – by the time she was old enough to write the books you’d be too old to read them. Not that I’m too old to read them yet, but it’s quite easy not to know about children’s authors if you’re not in the age range they’re advertised to around the time they’re coming out, or don’t have children that age.
I’m sure there are plenty of well-known American children’s authors that I’ve never heard of, though.
She’s really not an sf author, and not really a fantasy author in the way that I think you mean – she was a fairly mainstream (and pretty well known) children’s author, although she did write a handful of more adult books.
Thanks, that is indeed a different niche.
The context in which you may be most likely to have come across her is that she wrote the original book “Howl’s Moving Castle” that the Miyazaki anime film is based on.
If I may be so heretical, the book is much better than the film: in particular, Sophie, the heroine, loses much of her cheerful resilience and resourcefulness in the film, and gets the generic Miyazaki heroine treatment. One also misses the book’s characterisation of her entirely clear-eyed love for Howl, (many) warts and all.
My daughter rightly said that the way not to be too disappointed by the movie if you know the book is to see it as the self-mythologising Howl‘s version of the events of the novel.
[“Howl” is of course, Welsh. Hywel. I am in no way bitter that this important point is ignored in the film.]
Jen in Edinburgh: I meant that she was nine years older than Athel.
DE: you would be disappointed by the movie if you have read the book, agreed. Your daughter has nice instincts :/
languagehat, I wouldn’t push Diana Wynne Jones as a must-read for your particular taste, but I would if you asked for books from a child’s point of view grounded in English lower-middle-class family life of the 70s-80s, often droll but never minimizing bullying and prejudice and parental neglect, and especially strong on realistic sibling relationships with both rivalry and mutual support. If you were au courant with current sff, you would have heard of her (I think even now, 15 years after her death). Lots of awards and nominations, a Miyazaki movie in 2004.
And come on, you say sff readers are still “niche” in *this* century? When most of the top-grossing movies of the last couple of decades are sff? When J.K. Rowling is a billionaire? When the New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists have routinely included Stephen King, George R.R. Martin, Suzanne Collins, Rick Riordan, etc. for decades?
I’m not surprised that Athel Cornish-Bowden hadn’t heard of Jones though, because she wasn’t well known until long after his childhood, and maybe his daughter’s childhood too. Also, (if I remember correctly) his daughter grew up in France and Chile, so maybe not reading the latest children’s literature in English.
I was immensely pleased when I discovered that Calcifer’s saucepan song is a real Welsh song!
which of those names is the surname?
Although it’s hardly an infallible heuristic, evidently-Welsh potential surnames following one another at the end of a full name are likely to form a single bipartite surname, whether hyphened or not. This kind of thing is much commoner in Wales than England, and doesn’t at all have the same posh vibe as English double-barrelled names. I presume it basically took off as an effort at sheer disambiguation, as there are very few different echt Welsh surnames, most of which are just repurposed patronymics.
I was immensely pleased when I discovered that Calcifer’s saucepan song is a real Welsh song!
Youbetcha. Possibly the realest … un, dau, tri …
Mae bys Meri-Ann wedi brifo,
A Dafydd y gwas ddim yn iach.
Mae’r baban yn y crud yn crio,
A’r gath wedi sgrapo Sioni bach.
ㅤ
Tutti:
Sosban fach yn berwi ar y tân,
Sosban fawr yn berwi ar y llawr,
A’r gath wedi sgrapo Sioni bach.
In John James’ excellent Not For All The Gold In Ireland, the sequel to his better-known Votan, which is likewise set in Roman times, the British characters are often said to sing a song featuring a cauldron … I think, also with a nod to the miraculous cauldron in Branwen ferch Llŷr. We have long been a saucepan-loving people.
DWJ left behind an unfinished MS which was completed for publication by one of her sisters, viz. Ursula Jones. Who may for all I know have some theoretical claim to go by Ursula Wynne Jones that she declines to use, but it also tends to make it more likely that the family name is merely Jones. Ireland offered the hyphenated Vere Wynne-Jones (1950-2006), claimed to have been “familiar to audiences of RTE radio and television and to audiences of Dublin station Q 102 for his news reading, news reports and sports commentaries.” That Dublin station should not be confused with the Q102 in Philadelphia,* which I listened to quite a lot when I was in junior high.
*I would have said Q-102, hyphenated, but the current website has it without a hyphen and I can’t quickly find an online scan of any vintage promotional stuff that would confirm one way or another whether it was hyphenated back during the Carter administration.
From this obituary in The Independent, it appears that Wynne was simply her middle name. As you can see, she apparently also met Arthur Ransome and Beatrix Potter during the war.
But then, these are people capable of writing neé.
I take this as a sign of hope that her sister might not actually have been named Isobel…
It is indeed IsObel, which FWIW is said in some sources to be the traditional Scots spelling. She replaced the surname “Jones” with another one (I assume via the usual mechanism) and is asserted to have “been one of the most powerful, dynamic and inspirational figures in literary and cultural studies over the last three decades,” although I’m not sure what date this encomium (“oration”) was written and the three decades counted back from: https://www.bbk.ac.uk/about-us/fellows/isobel-armstrong
Jen, I don’t know what you mean by “not really a fantasy author in the way that I think you mean” — all DWJ’s books (except her obscure first novel) are definitely fantasy. Many are set in fantasy worlds, including Howl’s Moving Castle (though it has a brief visit to 1980s Wales, and it’s built on a John Donne poem). Many others have a realistic setting, but the plot depends on fantasy elements. The heart of Dogsbody, for example, is a little girl faced with the loss of her parents, 1970s anti-Irish bigotry (which shocked me, I had no idea), and an abusive foster family all at the same time, but the plot is that Sirius has been sent to Earth in the form of a dog to seek a magical McGuffin.
Alun Wyn Jones has the good fortune to get a Wikipedia footnote clarifying that “Alun Wyn are his given names and his surname is Jones.” John Wynne Jones (1803-1888) got a note claiming “This British surname is double-barrelled” — but some of the cited sources contradict it. None of the other 23 people named (FIRSTNAME) Wyn(n)(e)(-)Jones that I could find on Wikipedia got any note. As far as I could tell, Jones is the surname of 11 of them, and Wyn(n)(e)(-)Jones of the other 12, usually with hyphen. So you never know.
1970s anti-Irish bigotry
Cf. the title of John Lydon’s autobiography.
Isobel
It was a fashion. Compare Aunt Dahlia’s warning to Bertie Wooster: “…no good can come of association with anything labelled Gwladys or Ysobel or Ethyl or Mabelle or Kathryn.”
“Isobel” is the sole correct spelling. It is used by my family (including members very much younger than Aunt Dahlia), and is therefore normative. I have spoken. Further discussion is superfluous.
(Possibly Scottish, as an Anglicisation of the even more correcterer “Ishbel.”?)
I interpret Aunt Dahlia’s warning as alluding to the “y” rather than the “o.”
IIRC (which I do) the narrator’s wife in A Dance to the Music of Time is called Isobel, though conceivably this may be partly because she is an expy of Powell’s wife Violet.
I remember thinking the newsreader’s name was “Vere-Wynne Jones” until one broadcast the colleague to whom he handed over said “thanks, Vere”. His name was clearly Anglo-Irish, as was his accent, audible here.
Hat, you may not have read any of DWJ’s own works, but you’re probably read some of her (so to speak) indirect productions, as her son, Colin Burrow, is a frequent (and always worth reading) contributor to the LRB.
In the Spanish-speaking world Isabel (so spelt) is just the Spanish for Elizabeth. Once I was surprised to read a letter in El Mercurio, the leading newspaper of Santiago, that there were just two famous people called Elizabeth in the world, Elizabeth Taylor and Elizabeth the Queen Mother. (Don’t blame me: I wasn’t the one expressing this profound thought.) What about the Queen herself? I wondered. But no, she was La Reina Isabel (and was always called that).
all DWJ’s books (except her obscure first novel) are definitely fantasy
So are Roald Dahl’s (for example), with the possible exception of his autobiographies, and he’s about as mainstream a children’s author as you get. (Even more so in my childhood, probably.) I just don’t think the division works the same way for kids – or that children’s books cross the Atlantic as easily, although some very much do.
The Gruffalo is absolutely fantasy, if you look at it that way, but I wouldn’t expect an adult American fantasy reader to have heard of Julia Donaldson.
Thank you David for putting into words what I had observed myself (that double-barrelled names are much more common in Wales than in England, and that they don’t carry the same social baggage), and come to the same conclusion, that they overcome the paucity of Welsh surnames.
I wonder how other countries with few distinct surnames (Vietnam, Korea, China, Ghana…) overcome the ambiguity problem.
I read once, but I don’t know how true it is, that once during the Second World War the war office (in London, of course) had the bright idea of assigning called-up soldiers to different camps on the basis of their names, with the result that a training camp in Wales had 200 soldiers, with 197 called Jones.
I would nominate Dahl’s _Danny the Champion of the World_ as an example of a book with zero overt fantasy elements. I guess _Matilda_ has a “psychic powers” element although I’m not sure that goes in the same box as Rowlingesque “magic.”
When my eleven-year-old and I were in London last month we took the train out to Great Missenden, Bucks. and visited Dahl’s grave. Nearby are some suspiciously large footprints claimed to be those of one of his characters (the BFG). The Tube stations were full of advertisements reminding you that the stage-musical version of _Matilda_ is still running in the West End and wouldn’t you like to buy tickets.
other countries with few distinct surnames (Vietnam, Korea, China, Ghana…)
In Ghana, it varies a great deal by culture.
Ashanti traditional surnames are kinda automatically double-barrelled, as you take both your mother’s and your father’s clan names (the Akan culture being matrilineal.)
Actual mother’s-side/father’s-side surname double-barrelling is quite common among more Anglicised familes in the south, too.
The Kusaasi traditionally didn’t have surnames at all: everyone knows what clan they belong to, but clan names aren’t used as surnames (unlike with the Mossi.) In interactions with the modern state, people use their actual Kusaal personal name as a surname, and a baptismal name (or Muslim analogue) as a “Christian” name: people who are neither Muslim nor Christian (the majority) just pick an English or French name they like. The “surnames” arising in this way are just starting to become hereditary now.
It doesn’t help on the ambiguity front that, although in principle almost anything could be the basis of a Kusaal personal name, in practice just a handful of given names account for the majority of people. We used to try to get round this in the hospital by adding residential information: Awini-from-Kukpariga etc.
The Mossi do use clan names as surnames, but just a few clans account for much of the more privileged stratum, which is why pretty much every other Mossi individual you’ve actually heard of is called Ouedraogo. As in Ghana, though, a lot of variety results in Burkina Faso from the fact that there are scores of different indigenous languages.
I wonder how other countries with few distinct surnames (Vietnam, Korea, China, Ghana…) overcome the ambiguity problem.
The Vietnamese refer to people by their given names (which come at the end, as per standard East Asian style), which are much more diverse — that’s why Ngô Đình Diệm was called “President Diem” and Võ Nguyên Giáp “General Giap.” The main exception is Hồ Chí Minh, known as Ho (not sure why).
China just doesn’t. Identical surnames are considered the same surname, to the point that marriage among people with the same surname is traditionally avoided as incest. Most surnames are 3000-year-old clan names (and most of these don’t make sense anymore: “sheet of”?), and the newfangled ones are 1000-year-old job titles (some of them even have two syllables). I suppose the fact that there are more than two politeness levels for address makes this easier (AFAIK 4: given name; “small” + last name; “old” + last name; last name + “Mr./Ms.” or title). The given names are so diverse that I don’t think people with the same whole name are common.
In Germany, it seems bosses used to number their employees if necessary: “Meier zwo”, “Meier drei”. The only examples I’ve seen were jokes, though (well, side gags in something else).
I’m not aware of connotations of double-barrelled surnames in German. They’re probably most common in the north, sometimes contain a very common name (Mueller-Töwe) but sometimes not (Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, Strack-Zimmermann), and always contain a hyphen – even Dr. Googleberg’s (Buhl-Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg).
In Germany, a lot of doubl-barreled names arose due to the rule that married couples had to share a surname. Originally, the default was the husband’s name when the couple couldn’t agree which name to choose, but (IIRC) that was changed in 1977. The other partner could add their old name with a hyphen. So the connotation with female wearers of double-barreled names used to be that they were progressive or had their own careers. I don’t know how much that connotation is still alive with people younger than my generation.
that was certainly the connotation in early/mid-1980s boston: a hyphenated name meant a kid’s parents had a specific kind of feminist (or feministish) egalitarian ethos. by the later 80s, there were DoubleCapitalized variants (i wish i could think of an example, but in my head they all just become GlaxoSmithKlein).
in my circles, my rough agemates’ kids (leaving out those with one primary parent) run the gamut: some with one or the other parent’s surname; some with both in either order (i think this is the most common); some with a new surname (sometimes a blend of the parents’, sometimes entirely original); some with a new surname that the parents also take on. but i don’t think i know any hyphenates.
For Welsh double-barrelled names I do like Rees-Zammit, which sounds like a polite swearword.
The given names are so diverse that I don’t think people with the same whole name are common. — Korean name clashes seem to be more common, if one extrapolates from the unrelated professional golfers Jeongeun Lee1 to Jeongeun Lee6.
@rozele: Back then, hyphenated names created by someone adding their pre-marriage surname to the common surname were not inherited by the children in the German system; if the couple agreed on Müller and one partner used the hyphenated Müller-Meier, the children would be all Müller. That was changed later, I don’t know exactly when, but I guess that happened when they allowed both partners to wear the hyphenated surname.
As always, I am bewildered and annoyed by the assumption on the part of governments that they have a right to tell people what names they are allowed to use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_clans
in my circles, my rough agemates’ kids (leaving out those with one primary parent) run the gamut: some with one or the other parent’s surname; some with both in either order (i think this is the most common); some with a new surname (sometimes a blend of the parents’, sometimes entirely original); some with a new surname that the parents also take on. but i don’t think i know any hyphenates.
Among my agemates, most that I know of went with the patriarchal custom of our childhood. I can think of one where the wife kept her surname. One couple hyphenated their names, wife’s first, but after fighting that battle they decided to give their son only his paternal surname.
My younger son and his wife have hyphenated their surnames, certainly out of feminism rather than poshness (though we are very posh.)
With my Hispanic son and his wife the question is moot, of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_naming_customs
The hyphenation-for-egalitarian-reasons custom has been around for enough decades by now that there must have been marriages between the offspring of such unions who thus had the opportunity to create a new four-part surname (with three hyphens). Are there real-world instances of that opportunity being taken advantage of?
languagehat : “As always, I am bewildered and annoyed by the assumption on the part of governments that they have a right to tell people what names they are allowed to use” : It is what I grew up with. Not having that is somewhat of a welcome novelty, which I’m not sure will endure.
Restrictions on individual/family autonomy when it comes to naming are sufficiently common cross-culturally that hat shouldn’t find them bewildering although he is certainly free to find them annoying. That American practice has traditionally (add lots of asterisks and footnotes as needed) been somewhat looser than that of various other current/recent societies is IMHO a nice thing, but in no sense a “natural” or inevitable thing.*
Obviously there’s also cross-cultural variation on how easy it is in practice to ubiquitously go by an unofficial nickname (and it may vary by context) w/o needing to “officially” change ones “official” name.
*We do generally have a restriction on names spelled with non-ASCII characters, although people in their private lives are free to print up business cards or letterhead using such characters in the “unofficial” spelling of their name.
Obviously none of the names allowed in Bulgaria before 1991 were allowed to contain ASCII characters. 🙂 I think the first time it was allowed was in the late ’90s. 1998?
@V: Well, the generalizable principle is that it should not be surprising for a given nation’s law to require names to be spelled with the characters available in the locally-preferred alphabet-or-other-script. Some may of course be more generous in some contexts. When I lived in Japan I never had a resident-alien identification card because I was under 16 and thus exempt from the requirement to carry one. The apparently-current model of the card I found on the internet, which may or may not be the same format used back then, is apparently happy to print an alien’s Latin-scripted personal name in romaji rather than transcribed into katakana although e.g. the alien’s residential address in Japan is written only in kanji/kana (except for Arabic numerals). And of course both Japanese and Bulgarian passports will include ASCII versions of the bearers’ names for the convenience of border-control authorities in other countries unfamiliar with non-ASCII scripts.
Something I saw twice, once in Portugal and once in Brazil, and nowhere else (but only once in Portugal and only once in Brazil, so there is no basis for saying this is a general phenomenon) were reports of examination results on notice boards in which the students were shown in alphabetical order of their given names.
I wondered if that was related to the chaos of Portuguese surnames — much less straightforward than Spanish, where paternal name followed by maternal name is universal. In 1999 I was part of an international panel set up by the Portuguese ministry of research to assess the quality of chemistry research in different centres. In preparation for that we were sent a large batch of CVs. Some of the names were straightforward, just one or two given names followed by one or two surnames, often the names people put on their publications, but they were the exceptions, and there were lots with three given names followed by as many as six or seven surnames. I’ve never seen a Spanish name that goes back more than one generation (not for a living person anyway; historical figures may be different), but these often went back two or even three generations. You might find a CV for Pedro João António Pereira Pinto Vaz Nunes Gomes Carvalho da Silva, but how would you disentangle that?
The simplest system is like the Spanish, but with the maternal first and the paternal second. On a later trip to Portugal I asked someone explain it to me. She said that until the early 20th century Portugal followed the Spanish order, but then the government decided to invert it to make it clear that they weren’t obliged to do whatever Spain did (much as Canadians call the last letter of the alphabet zed so that people won’t think they’re the 51st state). However, she said, many people continued to do it the old way, as well as not restricting themselves to two surnames. What we see today is the chaos that resulted.
Incidentally, although double barrelled surnames are rare in England (much rarer than in Wales) and France, the conventional orders are different. In England the paternal name comes last, whereas in France it comes first: no one refers to President d’Estaing. Despite the rarity of such names, people instinctively follow the conventional order: in England I was often Mr Bowden, and in France I’m nearly always M Cornish.
On the honours board at my school there was someone called Hovell-Thurlow-Cumming-Bruce. There is also Admiral the Honourable Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax and the Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes family, with a mere three names. All these are posh families, which mine isn’t, though poshish, I suppose.
Restrictions on individual/family autonomy when it comes to naming are sufficiently common cross-culturally that hat shouldn’t find them bewildering although he is certainly free to find them annoying.
Really? You’re never puzzled by things lots of people do? Your sang-froid and capacity for universal acceptance is remarkable. I’m bewildered by all sorts of things, like the common tendency for people to do whatever a person who seems to be “in authority” tells them to do, even if it violates common sense or basic morality, and the fact that so many people identify the artist with the art, being angry at actors who play “bad” characters and refusing to see movies by “bad” directors. I’m not surprised, mind you — I have a pretty good grasp of the world I live in — just bewildered. The world would be a much better place if people didn’t act that way, and those people themselves would be better off.
Rees is of course Welsh, but Zammit is, I think, Maltese.
As for governments telling people what names they can have, when my daughter’s twins were born ten years ago she wanted to have them registered as Cornish-Axxxxx, where Axxxxx is her husband’s name but the (French) registrar said that that wasn’t allowed: she could add the whole of her surname but not part of it. She went for Axxxxx because she thought that Cornish-Bowden-Axxxxx was too heavy.
If I see a widespread phenomenon that does not make sense to me, my default attitude is that the world is a complicated place and my understanding of it is imperfect and incomplete. I suppose that’s only subtly different then bewilderment except to the extent bewilderment has an implicature of surprise that things aren’t otherwise. And hat says his own bewilderment is not surprised. I daresay that “sang-froid and capacity for universal acceptance” may be attitudes I have had to work to somewhat self-consciously develop. I recommend them, but YMMV.
I am intrigued to learn that the aforementioned quadruple-barreled Admiral Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax was the younger brother of the noted author Lord Dunsany, who was merely Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett – so, two of the four components of the quadruple-barreled option but unhyphenated and in a different order. Wikipedia says the brothers became estranged in adulthood “for reasons not fully clear but connected to [their] mother’s will” and perhaps some of the admiral’s additional surname-components were from families historically connected with the properties mom had given him rather than his older brother who had the title and the Irish estates. As far as wikipedia knows, the current Lord Dunsany is merely Randal Plunkett, with no further additions. He seems to be named for his grandfather (the 19th baron and son of the author), who was Randal Arthur Henry Plunkett, so three given names with but a single surname.
there must have been marriages between the offspring of such unions who thus had the opportunity to create a new four-part surname — one way to avoid exponential surname explosion would be to give a child a binomial combining a random parent’s maternal surname with the other parent’s paternal surname,* in a random order. To spread the ancestral respect, different full siblings can each have different a surname permutation, which is sure to liven up family trips abroad by interactions with confused and suspicious passport-control agents.
* This assumes precisely two parents, each having precisely one parent of each of the two most common genders; generalising should be straightforward nope unintended.
We do generally have a restriction on names spelled with non-ASCII characters
for my entire adult life, i’ve followed melanie kaye/kantrowitz’s approach to preserving both sides of a changed surname, so i have a / in my name. twenty years ago, that was thoroughly uncomplicated in both analog and digital contexts. now, it is extremely unusual to encounter a situation where i can use my actual name, especially in digital forms, which consistently (and almost invariably in fields tagged as names) exclude any symbols (ASCII or otherwise) besides the 26 letters of the english roman alphabet and hyphens. i can’t help but see that active refusal to use the radically increased flexibility of digital text over that timespan as a variably-deliberate hostile response to the increase in the range of naming practices active in the u.s., both within anglophone/anglocultural spheres and beyond.
on the question of “legal names” and state recognition of names in the u.s., i commend to your attention this detailed account of the wild disjuncture between formal law and actual practice in both legal and other settings. the tl;dr is, in their words: “this common notion that every person has a single, clearly defined “legal” name is a kind of collective delusion we all seem to share (emerging somewhere in the late twentieth century), but is not grounded in legal or social reality.” which isn’t exactly news in these parts, but is quite interesting to see laid out in detail.
The celebrated (?) Wittgensteinian theologian D Z Phillips was, sadly, merely Dewi Zephaniah, and not Dewi Zammit Phillips, which would obviously have been much better.
https://wittgenstein-initiative.com/wittgenstein-in-swansea/
(“Wittgenstein in Swansea” has a pleasing “Einstein on the beach/Kafka on the shore” vibe.)
Sure. I don’t personally endorse the “only one true legal name” narrative myself, but bureaucracies are gonna bureaucrat, in a dynamic that has only become more pronounced over time, in particular with bureaucratic insistence that the version of your name on any Very Official Bureaucratic Document exactly match the one on relevant previous Very Official Bureaucratic Documents. One of my great-grandmothers, for example, abandoned her original first name in favor of one she just liked better (same first initial, FWIW) and AFAIK never did any government-form paperwork to accomplish that – she just held herself out under the preferred name, and everyone (maybe it was the 1890’s when she forced the issue?) just played along. By contrast, when one of my kids was issued an original 21st-century birth certificate with the middle-name space left blank (because his mother and I hadn’t yet reached a conclusion on that by the day of his actual birth) it was an extraordinary hassle and non-trivial expense to get an honest-to-goodness court order functionally filling in that blank so that he could then have e.g. a passport and social security card containing that middle name (which FWIW is hyphenated …), but there was no obviously workable shorter path that would guarantee that future bureaucracies would go along with the name.
That said, bureaucracies can be sophisticated when they’re adequately motivated. Some of our more expensive Pantopticon databases are intended to keep tabs on suspected or alleged terrorists who not infrequently have names natively-written in Arabic script and thus may often have multiple different ASCII spellings associated with the same individual in different contexts. I think they spend a lot of time and effort and money on software aimed at figuring out which variant spellings have the same underlying human referent, so that tabs can be more efficiently kept on that referent. rozele’s point that in other contexts they have not taken advantage of the way in which better technology makes it more feasible to tolerate more diversity of practice is still an entirely fair one.
Random “war story”: sometimes lawyers questioning a witness will ask “and have you ever been known by any other names” as sort of a stock question even if they have no specific reason to think the answer will be yes. I was once involved in a “glamorous” case involving a quasi-scandal in the international art world, and the lawyer asked the defendant who was a Paris-based art dealer (not my client, but aligned in interest with mine) that question and he paused and said something like “well, I’m technically the Comte de Such-and-such but I really don’t use the title very much.”
The current widespread use of double-barrelled names causes me to reflect with some amusement how, when I as young, my parents and I considered such names very pretentious. In those days, of course, they were associated with landed families wishing to preserve their surname when the heir to the estate had a different one.
Going back to the comment about Arthur Ransome’s character Titty – apparently it was the actual nickname of one of the family on whom he based the Walker children (from a book she had loved when younger). Curiously, he changed the eldest sister into a boy to make his books appeal to both sexes, but it apparently didn’t occur to him or his publisher that readers would find ‘Titty’ an odd name.
which consistently (and almost invariably in fields tagged as names) exclude any symbols (ASCII or otherwise) besides the 26 letters of the english roman alphabet and hyphens
Now I’m wondering whether Elon Musk’s offspring X Æ A-Xii had to change the ligature for official purposes. Although maybe, in his wholesale ransacking of various Federal databases, Musk was able to get the name surreptitiously installed in the system.
Incidentally, when I was in grammar school, I had a classmate whose name was Alistair something something something surname, with no hyphens. I didn’t know him well, but he seemed rather sheepish about it, perhaps to avoid mockery and derision. He wasn’t noticeably posh, as I recall.
Æ is certainly a good old English-alphabet letter. The question, in these asciified times, is whether it is as obsolete as thorn and yogh or can still hang on.* There are certainly extant typefaces that use the ligature in non-capitalized position as in archaeology etc., and I think use of the ligature has varied in typeset Latin.
*We should have held on to thorn and yogh not least so we could graciously accept that we needed digraph workarounds for them in situations where a universal/global/lowest-common-denominator Latin alphabet was sensible in context.
I still get caught out sometimes by the fact that French œ can’t be written as oe, no matter how nicely you ask your word search.
That question was brought up a lot when Austria liberalized its surname legislation in the late 80s or maybe even earliest 90s. So far, I think the only real examples of surnames with more than two parts that I noticed have been noble and not Austrian (good old von Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha and zu Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg are the only ones that comes to mind right now; of course there are more).
To bureaucracies it obviously matters what exact form of what name they’re supposed to use. There are people in Germany with a ß in their surnames who got notifications they had to pay taxes, with their names spelled in all-caps and the ß therefore carelessly replaced by SS, and refused to pay on the grounds that the name on the notification wasn’t their name. There’ve been court cases and all. (No idea what the outcomes were.)
Surprises me actually. At that time, most of the internet told me my name was invalid, and it’s gotten better since then. (Still I’ve never dared to try to book a plane ticket with my accent on.)
Universal in the 18th century, absent since soon after the beginning of the 20th, is my impression.
reports of examination results on notice boards
*clutches pearls, looks for smelling salts*
In my country, you can literally go to prison for that, though I doubt anyone ever has.
@David M.: Here in the U.S. some investors once bought some real estate in Illinois from the heirs of the deceased Carroll V. Raines, which due to a typo was subject to an IRS lien for unpaid taxes referencing the not-technically-existent Carrol V. Raines. The buyers were held by the courts to be stuck with the lien and thus effectively obligated to pay off the relevant portion of the late Mr. Raines’ back taxes if they didn’t want the IRS to auction off the property. The theory was that a reasonably diligent buyer should have searched for misspellings and/or spelling variations before assuming that the property was unencumbered and that cautious and competent purchasers of real estate routinely do so (more realistically, whoever they are getting title insurance from arranges for someone do so). Perhaps the result would have been otherwise in German court — legal systems probably differ as to when arguments that are essentially magical-thinking might actually be valid versus when they aren’t.
Likewise illegal in Austria; some professors posted them anyway lo these onescore years ago, sorted by last name; most posted them with immatriculation numbers instead of names, fulfilling the spirit of the letter well enough; I remember one case of a professor refusing to post them on the grounds that this was illegal and telling people to visit him in his office.
To bureaucracies it obviously matters what exact form of what name they’re supposed to use.
I’m sure it does. Lots of things matter to me that I don’t get to decide for other people.
I don’t think examination results were normally ever posted on notice boards either at my school or at university, but it never occurred to me that it was illegal. The word “normally” is necessary because there was one chemistry teacher (who I never had) who did that sort of thing. However, he was a very weird person, and was the only teacher at the school that to my knowledge was ever dismissed (for other reasons). His name was Dr A. V. Adams, and he came from Eastbourne. That is very relevant, because at that time there was a Dr John Bodkin Adams in Eastbourne who was often in the news as he had murdered several of his wealthy women patients after persuading them to put him in their wills. Our Dr Adams used to tavel by train with a suitcase prominently marked “Dr Adams, Eastbourne”.
At a university, “Other Reasons” = GMT (Gross Moral Turpitude). At a school, I imagine a chemistry teacher could be dismissed for blowing up the school or causing permanent psychological or physical harm to other individuals on school property (e.g., by demonstrating the synthesis and consumption of Class A substances).
My younger son and his wife have hyphenated their surnames, certainly out of feminism rather than poshness (though we are very posh.)
With my Hispanic son and his wife the question is moot, of course.
I take it your son is not Argentinean or U.S.-American? Though the Spanish Wikipedia says double-barreled surnames are now allowed in Argentina.
Has this not been posted here before? It seems very Languagehat-appropriate.
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names – With Examples
I’m not 100% sure all of them are correct, but the general point that people can have a lot of false assumptions about how names work outside of their own experience remains quite valid.
Are there in fact cultures that only use familial relationships as referents, rather than actually having personal names? It’s all very well to make the claim, but I note that this truly odd outlier of a culture and language is not identified, which strikes me as suspect. [citation very much needed]
I could swear JC posted that in a comment at some point, but I can’t find it.
@om
Latin culture was sort of that way inclined, with names like Quintus or Septimus for boys and [SURNAME] + [FEMALE SUFFIX] for girls. I would not be extremely surprised if there were cultures that went further.
The earliest mention here of “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names” that Google shows me is by January First-of-May in 2019, with a link later in the thread given by David Marjanović. John Cowan also linked it in another thread, and it came up another time too.
The sensible takeaway from the arbitrary diversity of human naming practices when you look outside a given society or set of societies is that it is more or less impossible as an engineering problem to set up a single database that will accurately capture them all. From which it follows that programmers should not seek to do the impossible but instead figure out what the least-bad solution is within the particular set of goals and constraints and resources they have in the particular situation.
When computer were more primitive and digital storage more costly, this was perhaps easier to grasp. Almost 50 years ago when I was in 6th grade I was first introduced to standardized tests where you filled in ovals with #2 pencils and among other things you had to fill in your name. In ALLCAPS ASCII in a LAST FIRST MI order. If your last name had an apostrophe (not sure about hyphens or spaces), you omitted it. If your first name was more than eight letters long it got truncated. Someone had obviously figured out to their own satisfaction that the cost from having the computer memory for a nine-letter first name would not be worth the benefit of not truncating ELIZABETH to ELIZABET.* (That was the name of one of my classmates, and in that time and place the second most common given name that was more than eight letters long, with CHRISTOPHER in the lead.) I don’t remember how long the character budget for surnames was (longer than 8 certainly) but no doubt there were one or two kids in the school, even if not in my homeroom, who exceeded it. In any event your “name” in this context was not necessarily taken by anyone to be your Magical True Ineffable Name, but merely whatever approximation of it could be squeezed into and out of the particular system’s constraints. That the systems may due to technological advances have much more capacity and potential flexibility now doesn’t mean they have infinite capacity/flexibility, so the same issue will inevitably recur. Which is not a problem as long as programmers don’t pretend their systems are perfect as opposed to arguably-least-bad solutions to practical engineering problems that inevitably involve tradeoffs among various sorts of imperfection.
There are other versions of similar issues. For example, the standard format for writing out street addresses in Japan (and the conceptual apparatus behind it) is sufficiently different from that in the U.S. that it’s hard to design a simple user interface that will allow addresses in both formats to be entered in a “natural” low-burden-for-the-user way, and probably tricky to design a database that will store both types and sort them in the various ways you might want to.
*The ELIZABET in my particular class was in practice universally known by a four-letter nickname and not even one like Beth or Liza that transparently corresponded to the full name.
Time to create a Unicode-like standard for names.
In addition to what PP says about Roman naming conventions, I also remembered that Arabic-speaking cultures also call people by both patronymics (Ibn [name]; son of [name]), and whatever the opposite term is — Abu [name] (Father of [name]), Umm [name] (Mother of [name]).
But that’s not their only referent, and of course, it only works because the parent or child actually has a personal name.
There’s a comment (on the link I just posted) that says bluntly that it’s a myth that “People have names” is false. But there’s also a reply comment to that that discusses the complexity of Burmese (or Myanmar) names:
At one point for my thesis I was looking up papers by Kyaw Tha Paw U, a Burmese-American atmospheric scientist. I never met him in person and don’t know if it’s the same U as the honorific; all I know for sure is that “Paw U” is his surname. (Google now informs me that his father was Richard Paw U, a diplomat.) Pretty sure there were some mangled citations calling him “U, K. T. P.” instead of the correct “Paw U, K. T.”
One can find some online references to Richard Paw U as “Richard Paw-U.” He may not have embraced the hyphenated approach but presumably it facilitated correct parsing and alphabetization for those who used it.
I had a lot of trouble with the US concept of a zip code and the difference as to how it works here.
Owlmirror: “Has this not been posted here before? It seems very Languagehat-appropriate.”
https://languagehat.com/visiting-aunt-jones/#comment-4702830
— it has been posted many, many times not just here but on multiple other places. Practically everyone who cares about it knows about it.
Yes! On separate occasions I’ve read that some culture in northern South America, and the Mansi in western Siberia, traditionally do that; it works because population density there is so low you can expect to be related to everyone you meet.
I have a colleague who publishes as Zin-Maung-Maung-Thein, presumably to avoid the assumption that they have a surname and that their papers can be cited as surname + initials. (Never met them, don’t know anything else about them, only seen a few papers.)
What is the difference?
Me, an intellectual:
Ha. Well, OK, not common by Chinese standards, but… from the “myths about names” site: “The Chinese name Zhang Wei is reported to be shared by over a quarter of a million people.” I bet “Wei” hides a bunch of homophones in each of the four Mandarin tones, but even so there are nowhere near 250,000 characters pronounced “wei”…!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As a side note to double-barreled surnames, there are the always unhyphenated “[surname] called [surname]” phenomena. In northern Germany, there are people like Theo Vennemann genannt Nierfeld, and in the Netherlands there’s my colleague Lily Hardeveld ook genaamd Kleuver.
That may be related to the phenomenon traditionally, or so I’m told, widespread in (parts of?) Austria where last names stick to farms in popular usage: if a farm belonged to people named Mayreder for the past few hundred years, it is the Mayreder farm, so if you’re the resident patriarch on that farm, you are the Mayreder farmer, and people will use Mayreder as your surname even if you only bought the place last year and your surname is legally Obermair… (Random Upper Austrian dithematic surnames used for effect. Note my clever avoidance of “bought the farm”.)
i have a friend who had a duo musical project called Æ – it was an excellent name for the project, but made it very hard to search for online.
—
@DM: it doesn’t surprise me that our experiences are very different – even with my slash i’ve got no characters outside the ASCII set, and any kind of diacritic shifts things into a whole nother category.
—
i hesitate to assume any part of the u.s. government is at all sophisticated in handling names. when there was still meaningful coverage of state surveillance, a fair amount of what it turned up was things like infants being turned away at airports, or flagged for interrogation, because their names loosely resembled that of someone on one or another watch list. not to mention all kinds of issues affecting people named gerry adams. in a rather different context, when i was working for a chinese puppetry & opera company, we were never (if memory serves) able to get a PRC-born performer’s records corrected to put his surname and personal name in the same order in all of them.
I think I mentioned this before, but in case I didn’t… my last name begins with “H”. My wife took my last name when we married. At that time, she was still a citizen of Kazakhstan, which meant that on her passport and other documents our last name began with Cyrillic “Х”. Now these documents also had a Romanized form of the name for international purposes, which had our last name beginning with “Kh”. When she started living in Germany, she obtained official German documents containing said transcription based on her passport, deviating from the way the surname was written in the official population register and my documents. Lots of problems ensued until we embarked on a major quest to change all the important ones of her documents to the spelling with “H”, which required us to visit various government agencies with a copy of our marriage record.
@Khans: If the Kazah authorities had only used the Yugoslav approach embedded in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaj%27s_Latin_alphabet the round-trip would have been less difficult.
Kazakh actually has a separate letter Һ һ, but evidently that isn’t expected to occur outside of Arabic names…
And at least back then, the Cyrillic in Kazakhstani passports was the Russian version (probably due to Soviet tradition and perhaps CIS compatibility), so e.g. a lady called Гауһар Gauhar “brilliant” in Kazakh would have been Гаухар Gaukhar in her passport.
The Chinese name Zhang Wei is reported to be shared by over a quarter of a million people.
I can’t find the original of that story (it seems to have been shared at least as far back as 2007…), but this blog post from 2020, citing a study from 2019, gives the exact characters: 张伟 (Zhāng Wěi). My reading is that it’s this specific version that appears nearly 300k times…
The Wikipedia disambiguation article for “Zhang Wei” lists character spellings for 15 of the people included; five of them are 张伟 [plus one 張伟, with the traditional-character version of the surname], with the rest split across various other characters (as it happens, the two 1993 footballers share the same one that does not appear in the other 13).
Oh! Thanks! Yes: