QotD: Middle Name
What's your middle name? Is there a story or history behind it?
This is a bit of a sore point at the moment, actually.
My birth certificate calls me Jeremy Grahame.
My Hebrew name is Yoram Boruch ben Avraham Zvi.
My mum says my English middle name is Benedict.
My dad disagrees.
My credit card calls me Yoram J B Grahame.
My driver's license calls me Yoram Jeremy Grahame.
My doctor's office calls me Jeremy Grahame.
My passport calls me Jeremy Grahame.
My son's birth certificate calls me Yoram Jeremy Grahame.
When I went to the Passport Office recently to get my son his first passport, this caused problems.
My wife is begging me to change my name by deed poll to Yoram Jeremy Grahame.
But my recently-approved US Visa calls me Jeremy Grahame. So it would cause problems with that.
I believe that under British law, a person's name is not a single canonical legally-defined thing. I read a mailing-list post on this topic in relation to the problems it would cause for the beleaguered ID Card proposals, and I've tried to find it ever since but haven't managed. (I'll post it here if/when I do.)
This post has turned out much duller than I thought it would.
Comments
But once you're in the US system, where it's somehow assumed that everyone has an American Name in American, dammit, things get tricky. That's weird, because the federal system does have a UID -- the Social Security number -- and you'd assume that as long as you had that to work with, it'd be fine. But it's limited by underlying tech that simply can't handle anything other than first-middle-last in that order, let alone Unicode. Matronyms, reverse-order? Nah. The spirit of Ellis Island's name-manglers lives on.