Terry Mitchell

The Conundrum of Hyphenated Names



Posted: Wednesday, January 05, 2011

by Terry Mitchell
http://commenterry.blogs.com

While watching the Washington Redskins play the Jacksonville Jaguars a few weeks ago, I started thinking about something that I had not previously considered. Two of the more prominent Jacksonville players, Maurice Jones-Drew and Mike Sims-Walker, have hyphenated surnames. Such names seem to be a recent trend, perhaps as one culmination of the women’s lib movement of the ‘60’s and 70’s.

Apparently, this is done as a way of tossing a bone to those women who do not want to give up their maiden names when they marry and also demand that their children carry them. However, there is a good reason why married couples have traditionally settled on a single surname for their family, generally that of the husband. It’s just a matter of practicality and common sense.

Let’s ponder this issue for moment, using the aforementioned Jacksonville football players as a starting point. Let’s suppose that Maurice Jones-Drew’s son married Mike Sims-Walker’s daughter and that Ms. Sims-Walker demanded that her maiden name be preserved after the nuptials. Then, any children that they produced might carry the surname of Jones-Drew-Sims-Walker.

Then let’s suppose that one of their kids married someone with the last name of Mitchell-Smith-Johnson-Hoover. Then their children might bear the protracted surname of Jones-Dew-Sims-Walker-Mitchell-Smith-Johnson-Hoover. And so on and so forth. By the fourth or fifth generation of such nonsense, the average surname would resemble a paragraph.
Terry Mitchell is a software engineer, freelance writer, amateur political analyst, and blogger from Virginia, USA. He posts a least one article a day to his blog - http://commenterry.blogs.com - on subjects such as current events, politics, technology, society and culture, religion, health and well-being, self improvement, personal finance, trivia, and sports. He is also the owner of a new privacy-enhanced search engine - http://www.SearchMost.com.

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