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In Western societies, how can a man have a hyphenated name? (and why!)

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tomos:
hmm, not sure what the legal requirements are here (in the UK) but plenty of "posh" people take on a hyphenated surname when they marry. it's all about them showing off their exceptional breeding, i suppose.
-nudone (March 02, 2011, 02:24 AM)
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More to do with land, which is why the breeding is important. If you've inherited more than you husband, he adds your surname to his own. If you've inherited a lot more, he takes yours and drops his own. At least, that's how it worked in the days when he took all the land too.  :mad:

Here in Ulster we have a tradition of christening a son with his mother's maiden name, or the surname of a closely related family from whom he may have - expectations.  :P  Lots of people called Johnston Thompson or the like.  Back the 19th century there was a landowner by the name of Porter Archdale for that very reason. Then he inherited the Porter estate, and changed his name to Porter Porter!
-JennyB (March 03, 2011, 04:27 PM)
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a variation on that (in Cork-Kerry region at any rate) is the use of parents first names. Because there's too many young fellahs with the same first names e.g. Dan, they get their fathers names added on, say it's then Dan-Paddy - and if that isnt enough to diferrentiate them from the others, the grandfather name (which the father probably already has added) gets added: Dan-Paddy-Andy. These new combinations tend to stick for life then - I've no idea how they're spelled though (with hyphen or not? Probably without.)

CWuestefeld:
Since my family name -- Wuestefeld -- is all but unspellable, my wife (fiance at the time) suggested we use her family name instead: Yu (pronounced like the word "you"). But while it's much shorter, it also caused great confusion. She'd always get into a "who's on first?" kind of thing:

"What's your name"

"Yu."

"No, I need to know your name."

So she started to answer "Yu: y - u", spelling it out to make it clear that she wasn't saying "you". She thought that was working until she got something in the mail addressed to "Cathy Uyu".

In the end, we mostly did the traditional thing. But since she was going through immigration at the time, and had the opportunity to make official whatever she wanted, she took her full Chinese name as two middle names, so now she's officially "Cathy Cen Yu Wuestefeld".

Stoic Joker:
so now she's officially "Cathy Cen Yu Wuestefeld".-CWuestefeld (March 04, 2011, 12:36 PM)
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Hay, now that's clever!

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