{"id":103,"date":"2008-08-25T14:05:51","date_gmt":"2008-08-25T19:05:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/?p=103"},"modified":"2008-08-25T14:05:51","modified_gmt":"2008-08-25T19:05:51","slug":"hyphenated-last-names","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/?p=103","title":{"rendered":"Hyphenated last names"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Someone at work asked me today about how I liked having a hyphenated family name, because she was thinking of doing it herself.  My reaction:  BIG mistake, don&#8217;t do it.<\/p>\n<p>I seriously regret hypenating my last name, because it creates an endless source of confusion.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>When people ask you for your name, it takes ten times longer to explain, and <em>always<\/em> requires spelling it out and stressing the hyphen.  Over the phone, it&#8217;s even more painful.<\/li>\n<li>It tends to break computer systems.  They hate hyphens.   They hate spaces.  Sometimes, if you&#8217;re lucky, computers just smash the two last names together, often truncating them anyway, since the combined last name is often &#8216;too long&#8217;.<\/li>\n<li>Even when people see it printed correctly, it confuses them.  If they see your printed name as &#8220;Benjamin Apple-Banana&#8221;, many will just call you &#8220;Benjamin Apple&#8221; or &#8220;Benjamin Banana&#8221;.  It&#8217;s like their brain just can&#8217;t handle the concept of a double last-name, so it automatically drops one.   Which means the whole romantic (or political) point of &#8220;encompassing both names&#8221; is basically lost on the public.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Really, I would gladly have changed my last name to my wife&#8217;s if I could go back in time.  It would have made life so much easier.<\/p>\n<p>And don&#8217;t forget:  if you&#8217;re male and thinking of changing your last name, be ready for some serious <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/?p=60\">institutionalized sexism<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Someone at work asked me today about how I liked having a hyphenated family name, because she was thinking of doing it herself. My reaction: BIG mistake, don&#8217;t do it. I seriously regret hypenating my last name, because it creates an endless source of confusion. When people ask you for your name, it takes ten [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=103"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":107,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions\/107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}