Thanks, Laura! So sorry about the headache with your son. You're absolutely right--it will work out--but it's so not fun in the meantime. Hang in there.

Okay, what the fuck? Honestly, I was in a hurry (to, um, get to a bar) when I called him, so I really wasn't listening that carefully. And I did pick up that he was reluctant. But - what the fuck did he say? And honestly, I can't imagine he said that much. But what he was thinking is pretty fucking clear. And pissing me off. (And hello - I asked for a week's worth of amoxycillin, not a month of fucking Oxycontin or Xanax or something

Um, yeah, that IS pretty weird. I mean, I can even understand that doctors and dentists may be reluctant to overprescribe antibiotics and possibly create resistance yadda yadda, but...WTF dude? I suppose you just have to go with the idea that at least he DID prescribe them, and clearly he ended up feeling bad, and if you like him in person, maybe give him the benefit of the doubt that he just expressed himself poorly? Maybe kinda tell him that next time you see him?

But yeesh. Imagine if you HAD been asking for some painkillers for the tooth that was WAKING YOU UP AT NIGHT.

I had to scroll back and read the dentist thing. Brenda, my take is that he normally is patient and nice on the phone but was curt and rude in his opinion. Maybe because of some other unrelated issue, or a recent serious drug seeking patient. He may not have even sounded all that insensitive to you but he may hold himself to a higher standard and genuinely feels bad that he didn't respond to you in the way you deserved.

I've also found three brothers who started out with the same last name in Poland, but in the US for some reason, one became Hochman and one became Hackman, and one seemed to use whichever suited him at the time.

I just did a show "Culture Clash in AmeriCCa" where the troupe (Culture Clash) interview a wide variety of folks in America. One interview was with a retired guy in Miami telling of his uncles & fathers arrival in America at Ellis Island. [paraphrase] "one came out Zimmerman, one came out Shimmerman, and my father came out Cinnamon!"

(eta the quote that prompted that lil tidbit)

t pedant Names didn't get changed at Ellis Island. The name recorded at Ellis Island was whatever name had been put down on the passenger list in Europe. t /pedant

(Who am I kidding? That tag never closes.)

Most of the big name changes I've been were within a year or so of immigration, where presumably the person just got fed up with no one being able to pronounce or spell their names the right way and just decided to go with the flow and spell or pronounce it the way everyone else was. Or, they just decided that the name wasn't working out, and picked something else.

I've read about a few instances where people have found letters that their relatives wrote back to the old country, saying, "Oh, by the way, our original name sounds funny here. I'm changing to to this. When you come over, give that as your name, so that it'll make things easier."

I've read about a few instances where people have found letters that their relatives wrote back to the old country, saying, "Oh, by the way, our original name sounds funny here. I'm changing to to this. When you come over, give that as your name, so that it'll make things easier."

I really wish my grandfather had done this.

In my last name, there's this stray n that tends to drift into the spelling. I have no idea why, but even when I spell the name for someone, letter by letter, they put in the n that I didn't say. One of my relatives seems to have just given up on trying to get people to spell it right and started spelling it with the extra n sometime in the late twenties. He changed his first name from Isidore to Irving at the same time, for reasons I can't figure out.

I've also found three brothers who started out with the same last name in Poland, but in the US for some reason, one became Hochman and one became Hackman, and one seemed to use whichever suited him at the time.

My grandfather's family did this. 3 sons, 3 new names.

He changed his first name from Isidore to Irving at the same time, for reasons I can't figure out.

People called him Izzy, which is a girls' name? I've never gotten a good explanation of why my grandfather's brother had his name legally changed from Immanuel Rubin to Rubin Immanuel. It was a lot clearer why my German immigrant neighbor changed his name from Adolf Rudolf to Rudolf Adolf in the '40s.

eta: It's pretty obvious that my last name wasn't changed.

The Bohemian side of the family, where my last name came from, came over in the 1870s and I've never figured out how to track down where they came from in Bohemia. We are hampered by not knowing their parents' names. Their parents sent them to a Catholic books school in Milwaukee when the boys were 10 and 12 to escape the potato famine and never saw them again, according to family legend.

Another confusing name place in Jewish genealogy at least is the early 1800s, which is when Jews were first required to take last names in most of Eastern Europe. Until then, they'd mostly just used whatever the local equivalent of "Nathan, son of Jacob" or whatever was. Tons of instances of grown brothers each taking different names, and then when the father dies it's recorded with one of the sons' names, even though that wasn't the name the father used. Also a bunch of instances of a father taking one name, and then his son growing up and using some other name, even though the names were supposed to be fixed by then. And I've found a bunch of people who just took their first name as their new last name, so their names got recorded as Wolf Wolf or Mann Mann.