If there's one thing that annoys me, it's women who hyphenate their names. I'm a doctor and as such must create charts which are then filed away in alphabetical order.

So Mrs. Jayne Gorden-Vangeroffson comes in for an exam. She writes her name on my form as Jayne Gorden-Vangeroffson. So we file her chart this way and then attempt to file her insurance.

But her vision plan has her listed as Jayne Vangeroffson and so the claim is denied. After several hours on the phone, my staff finally gets ahold of someone and they resolve the issue.

Then she gets pink eye and comes in for that. She identifies herself as Mrs. Vangeroffson this day. (When filing a hyphenated name, you're supposed to go by the first name of the two so she'd be filed under "G") My staff spends a long time looking all over the place but can't find her chart. We question her repeatedly about the file being listed under any other name, but she denies this and since she's been married for over ten years. Finally, we ask her if perhaps she hyphenated her name? Oh yeah, I think I did. So we finally find the chart right where it should have been.

I treat her and then try to file her medical insurance. Remembering the previous problem, we file under Jayne Vangeroffson. But her medical insurance has her as Jayne Gorden. More staff time wasted!!!!!!!

Please women, do not hyphenate your name. You will be creating nothing but problems for yourself and anyone who must deal with you. Doctors will not be able to find your chart. Insurance companies will not have you listed as a client. The list goes on.

If you want to keep your maiden name, keep it. Just tack the new name on at the end without a hyphen. Who gives a fuck if you have three or four names?

But please, no more hyphenated names!!!!!!!

go by the name on their birth certificates.
or.
go by the name on their marriage license.

either way enforce your rules.

Ah, but the insurance company won't necessarily follow my rules. Everyone is confused by hyphenated names. Mainly because few women hyphenate their names all the time. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

I never liked it.
It comes off as pretentious to me.

in that case the patient is responsible for the bill.

you could even put it in your disclaimer/ TOS that certain naming conventions apply at your office.

That is a good idea, to specifically ask the patient to list their name as it appears on their insurance card.

It is funny, in every office I've ever worked at from Indiana University to my current offices, no one can ever find charts belonging to women with hyphenated names.

Hell, women's charts in general are hard to find as their names change frequently with each marriage/divorce. For some reason my staff never thinks to ask if the patient might have had a different name at their last visit. I'll see them scurrying around like crazy trying to find a chart and say, "Did you ask if she might have had a different name or a hyphenated name at her last visit?" The answer is usually no.

So staff training would definitely help. But I fail to see a reason to hyphenate your name.

You people need to crawl out of our little American ghetto and go visit the other 90% of the world sometime to get some perspective. Hyphenated names are extremely common.

But what's also common is dual surnames that are not hyphenated. And they are not just for women. In Spain it's quite normal for a man to use both his father's and mother's surname--and the father's comes first. This is less common but nonetheless quite proper in most Spanish-speaking countries.

Sometimes they will write their name as Enrique Meseguer y Correa, sometimes as Enrique Meseguer-Correa. But you're just as likely to see it as Enrique Meseguer Correa. You're expected to know that Meseguer is a surname, not a Christian name. (They don't name their children Madison and Taylor like we do. Those are last names.) So you'd better not commit the faux pas of calling him Mister Correa! It's okay in informal speech to use only one surname, but its the father's name, the first one.

Arguably the most famous Spanish language writer in the world (actually one of the four or five most famous writers period, the sun is setting on English literature) is Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez. American newscasters continue to refer to him as Mister Márquez. That may have been okay fifty years ago when it was presumed that America was the center of the universe and we couldn't possibly be expected to master the conventions of other cultures, but it isn't okay any more.

Anyway, it's up to us computer people to make our stupid barely-functional virus-friendly user-hostile software conform to the real world, not vice versa. Millions of people have hyphenated names and it's not an affectation. It's reality. Software developers had better pull their heads out of their X-Boxes and pay attention.

It just isn't that difficult for a program to be designed to find Suzie Smith-Jones and Suzie Baker-Smith if you type in Suzie Smith, Suzie Jones, Suzie Baker, Suzie Jones-Smith, Suzie Smith-Baker, or Suzie Smith-Jones-Baker-Washington. It's called "requirements definition" and it's something that American software developers are proudly ignorant of. Draw a flowchart on the back of your Starbucks napkin then run back to your cubicle and start coding. Nonetheless, in places like Los Angeles County, where there are millions of people from other countries whose naming conventions are different, the municipal government software has no trouble finding people's records if they turn up in a public school, hospital, or sheriff's office, no matter how the clerk enters it. Computers are supposed to make stuff like that easy!

If you're software is so dysfunctional that it can't find something this easy, you should send it back for a refund. Or shoot the idiot programmer.

I've toyed with the idea of a hypothetical culture whose naming convention is both patrilineal and matrilineal.

For example: John Doe and Jane Smith marry, but both John and Jane keep their last names. Then they have two kids together, a boy and a girl. The boy is named Bob Doe, but the girl is named Sally Smith.

In this hypothetical culture, there are (theoretically) no hyphenated names to speak of. What would you make a hyphenated name with?

The common practice in America is very patriarchal. This hypothetical practice is better. But then, this one is very biased towards heterosexual couplings. What if one day we can artificially combine two men's sperm or two women's eggs and get otherwise perfectly natural offspring? Two women could only possibly have a daughter; whose name would she take? And whose name would the son or daughter of two men take?

Possibilities, possibilities!

I've toyed with the idea of a hypothetical culture whose naming convention is both patrilineal and matrilineal.

That seems like a reasonable and sensible practice. But I don't think you'll have to worry about two males or two females producing offspring. Unless you include artificial insemination or adoption by a homosexual couple, in which case the donor's name would be needed... or not...?

You do if we develop the technology needed to combine gametes from two people of the same sex, as I explained in my post.

Who knows? I haven't thought that deeply about it.

Its archaic for women to change their names after marriage.

The question that I have is ...when does it stop? And if it does stop, isn't that leaving someone's name out?

Baron Max "Jones-Smith-Carlotti-Bugatti-Winston-Harrelson-Benton-Jamison-Karlson-Carlson-Wainright-Adams-Greenway-Natanelli-Seymor-James"

There should be no last names. Everyone should take a geographic name.

Signed,
Geoff of Philadelphia

And just how many "Geoff of Philadelphia"s do you think there'd be? As it is right now, matching names all over the nation is becoming a challenge for all kinds of record-keeping, etc.

Baron Max

Well, there's me.

I don't care about the rest. People keep too many records anyway.

So what ye're saying is that ye're too selfish and self-centered to consider the needs of any other people in the world? How does that feel?

Baron Max

This is ironic. Or have you had a change of heart in the past month that I've been gone?

Bullshit.
The vast majority still do.

Isn't american bureacracy a bitch?

In Finland you give your social and you don't need to hyphenate your name. Everything is automatically updated. There can't be any errors.

Saves everybody hours of work.

Socialism is progress.

The concept not the practice.