The Alphabetical Problem

Perhaps the silliest part of my life as a hyphenate has been the alphabet issue. Yes, I know my ABCs, but I can never quite remember where to find myself in an alphabetical listing. Is it G or is it O? I don't have a clue and neither do the list makers that put me in every which place.

Personally, I see myself as a G. I think of G as the first letter of my last name. Greene-Owens.

Still many times I find my name sitting under the O column. Don't they recognize it as one name? I know that some people feel that Greene is just another middle name for me. Greene-Owens. Where do you put the emphasis?

Emily Post, it seems, does not have a definitive answer.

I have been reading a lot of articles about name hyphenation recently. It has produced some interesting results. In many ways I am pleased to know that there are other women who are defending their naming choice (yes, it is a choice), but it made me sad that this is an issue for them. We are living in a single last name world.

Here are a couple of excerpts from other ladies hyphenation woes:

"When I got married, I didn't change my last name. I guess we both could have hyphenated our names, but that wasn't very appealing to either of us, and I certainly wasn't going to hyphenate if my husband wasn't going to. Instead, we did that to our daughter. It just seemed too strange to me to contemplate being in a family in which my daughter had my husband's last name and not mine (too), even stranger than our all having different last names.

Then we had to decide which name would go first. We decided to decide based on what sounded best, and we agreed that the order that sounded best was my name first.

Our first plan was that she would have two last names without a hyphen, but we were told at the hospital when her birth certificate was being filled out that it was illegal to have a 'space' in a last name. I said "What if our name were van Gogh or da Vinci?". They said no go(gh). Perhaps we got an uninformed person doing the birth certificate, but I was desperate to go home and they told us we couldn't leave the hospital until we gave our daughter a last name with no spaces. Bizarre.

So she has a hyphen, and a long last name that doesn't quite make it intact onto some forms. The only one who has ever been upset about our daughter's last name is my mother-in-law. She didn't like the hyphenation and she particularly didn't like the fact that my name was first. She told us that she hoped people would think that that name was a middle name and that the real last name was her son's (no matter that my mother-in-law has kept the name of a man she divorced and loathed for the rest of his life)." (Female Science Professor)

"I suppose I believed, naively it now seems, that Texas was ready for a woman with a hyphenated name. After all, it was 1991, and I knew an artist* who had shared his wife's name for over 15 years without difficulty. The British have had hyphenated names for centuries. Magazines were full of interviews with well-known celebrities sporting double names. How complicated could this be?

Very.

For starters, most people do not realize that two words connected by a hyphen should be treated as a single word. They automatically split off the last half and say Mrs. Rainwater. When corrected, they simply don't know what to do. At the dry cleaners, they have taken to calling me Mrs. Chancewater. It's not uncommon to hear Mrs. Chancerainwa..., as if the speaker is just embarrassed to say the entire name. I wonder if Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg has this much trouble picking up her dry cleaning?

Then there's the length problem. I think it was a prescription label where this problem first surfaced. The name simply wouldn't fit in the space the computer thought proper for a last name. The pharmacist settled for abbreviating it to Chance-RainH2O. That worked for a man with chemistry background, but confused the heck out of the little slacker clerks behind the counter. "Last name" they would demand. "Chance-Rainwater" I would reply, and they would head straight for the basket marked R, and return with the news that there was no prescription. "Try looking under C", I would suggest. "Why?" they would ask. "It's the first letter of my last name." I would say in exasperation. I think they finally have the hang of it, after seven years of trying. They never did catch on in the photo processing department - we just had to take our film somewhere else.

My doctor's office likewise wanted to file my records under R. When I insisted that they be properly filed under C, the clerk responded "Well, then you'll always have to tell me Chance-Rainwater" as if I were going to come in one day demanding that my name was Schopenhauser. I suppose you would file that under H.

The other day, I was standing in line at the pharmacy. The woman ahead of me was vainly trying to get the clerk to look for her prescription under S. "Hyphenated last name?" I asked. She nodded. "Me too," I said "I had no idea how much trouble it was going to be.". "Yeah," she replied, "but it's worth it."" (Life with a Hyphen)

You know what? I do think that it is worth it. I don't really care how I am alphabetized. I chose this name and I like it----just the way it is.

KEGO