I'm losing my touch. I just now checked to see how far my aunt is from Florida baseball. The answer - too far. Darn it.

Pumpkin fudge.

On the names discussion. I got married at 19, so went with the flow, but I'd probably have done the same thing - exchanging a difficult to pronounce maiden name that was 14 letters and 2 hyphens long for a simple to say married name that was a mere 5 letters. I actually had "friends" who encouraged me to hyphenate the two. Bah!

meara is one of those who is always meara, real name notwithstanding. shrift, too.

My name was a big big deal when I got married, because I eloped. We'd actually talked about both of us taking my grandmother's name, which I think we would have actually done had we had a traditional wedding (and thus, time to talk it over with her and with his family) because my mom was an only child, so the name is now rare.

But then I loved my middle name, which is my other grandmother's first name, and didn't want to lose it. So I was going to go FirstName MiddleName MarriedName. But to my parents it felt like wholesale rejection, like I didn't want anything to do with them. I'd hurt them needlessly enough with the whole eloping thing, so I went ahead and kept them all.

So my legal name is FirstName MiddleName MaidenName MarriedName, almost like the Latin way. But then I still use FirstInitial MiddleInitial LastInitial on legal documents, so it's mostly only symbolic.

Still, since I ended up with an English first and last name, I'm glad to have the Japanese two middle names.

Congratulations, meara!

As for married names, DH and I both hyphenated. It was impt to him that we both change our names since marriage would inevitably change both of us. Oddly however SS dropped the hyphen when they made the change official.

I am now finding that hyphenating is considered outre or weird most of the time. Lots of people comment on my name, and most of the comments are negative. (And just to add to the weird, DH says that he gets lots of compliments on the name, LOTS.)

name, name, whats in a name? A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet, no?

My head is rolling from all this name talk. At first i was like...skimmy skimmy skimmy...doesn't apply much to me....

o wait. ya... I kinda changed my name.

For the most part I go by my initials (first, middle) mostly cuz I hate first name, tho, funny due to start of this conversation, less so of late. I changed over to initials in college. 1st day of classes, all 3 classes had 3 different Brian's in them. That put at least 10 in a class of 400. So it seemed a good idea to re-invent myself as BC to avoid confusion (and avoid a name I didn't care for).

I go by Drew now, but was Andrew up until about 10 years ago. It wasn't even a conscious thing that I did, it was friends that just started calling me Drew, and then as I moved around for school the folks that called me Drew instead of Andrew were in the majority. It stuck to the point that now almost everyone I know only knows my name as Drew and are a bit surprised when someone from my past calls me Andrew.

I also spent a year in undergrad going by my middle name, Spencer.

trying to picture you as spencer...

are you for hire?

For the "awww" factor, directly from Snopes:

Puppy born with heart-shaped pattern in fur.

I was always impressed by people who managed to change their names--I knew a girl in elementary school who was Beth, and we went to different middle schools. By the time we went to the same high school, she was Liz. I was so jealous of having multiple nicknames to choose from!

I decided when I went to college, I'd go by my middle name (or, a diminutive of it--Catie, for Catherine). Because I didn't know anyone there, so it was all in how I introduced myself, right?

Yeah, and then I introduced myself to the first fifty peopel I met as my real name, and went "Doh!"

Ah well.

My middle name is John. Just John. Pretty boring.

In high school my nickname was Tommy John.