It's interesting looking through some of the replies to these complaints.

One person simply notes that in Finland the SS# equivalent is the key and that's all that matters.

Another person responded to a complaint on the subject by saying:

Personally, I think it's disrespectful to a person to write his/her name as anything other than the way that person want's to see it. Smithbarney is not the same as Smith-Barney. If I was Mr. Smith-Barney and received a letter with my name improperly spelled like that I would not be favorably inclined towards whatever the letter was about.

You state that you are using 'Title Case' (StrConv I assume). Are you concerned with names like O'Brien and Smith-Barney being improperly capitalized as O'brien and Smith-barney? It's no problem to write a User Defined function to check for a hyphen within a name and capitalize the next character if that is your concern. A table of name exceptions does well with names like O'Brien (as well as McDonald and van den Steen).

Another notes that hyphenated names and multiple names are common in other parts of the world saying...

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You people need to crawl out of our little American ghetto and go visit the other 90% of the world sometime to get some perspective. Hyphenated names are extremely common.

But what's also common is dual surnames that are not hyphenated. And they are not just for women. In Spain it's quite normal for a man to use both his father's and mother's surname--and the father's comes first. This is less common but nonetheless quite proper in most Spanish-speaking countries.

Sometimes they will write their name as Enrique Meseguer y Correa, sometimes as Enrique Meseguer-Correa. But you're just as likely to see it as Enrique Meseguer Correa. You're expected to know that Meseguer is a surname, not a Christian name. (They don't name their children Madison and Taylor like we do. Those are last names.) So you'd better not commit the faux pas of calling him Mister Correa! It's okay in informal speech to use only one surname, but its the father's name, the first one.

Arguably the most famous Spanish language writer in the world (actually one of the four or five most famous writers period, the sun is setting on English literature) is Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez. American newscasters continue to refer to him as Mister Márquez. That may have been okay fifty years ago when it was presumed that America was the center of the universe and we couldn't possibly be expected to master the conventions of other cultures, but it isn't okay any more.

Anyway, it's up to us computer people to make our stupid barely-functional virus-friendly user-hostile software conform to the real world, not vice versa. Millions of people have hyphenated names and it's not an affectation. It's reality. Software developers had better pull their heads out of their X-Boxes and pay attention.

It just isn't that difficult for a program to be designed to find Suzie Smith-Jones and Suzie Baker-Smith if you type in Suzie Smith, Suzie Jones, Suzie Baker, Suzie Jones-Smith, Suzie Smith-Baker, or Suzie Smith-Jones-Baker-Washington. It's called "requirements definition" and it's something that American software developers are proudly ignorant of. Draw a flowchart on the back of your Starbucks napkin then run back to your cubicle and start coding. Nonetheless, in places like Los Angeles County, where there are millions of people from other countries whose naming conventions are different, the municipal government software has no trouble finding people's records if they turn up in a public school, hospital, or sheriff's office, no matter how the clerk enters it. Computers are supposed to make stuff like that easy!

If you're software is so dysfunctional that it can't find something this easy, you should send it back for a refund. Or shoot the idiot programmer.

When I was using my maiden name, I would often get the wrong chart at doctor's offices because there were so many other people with my name, and I would practically make people who had to look up my name in a database cry. So, there were problems there too, they were just different problems.

If there's one thing that annoys me, it's women who hyphenate their names.

I find that reaction annoying. ETA: OK on reread I can see that you just were finding evidence, weren't necessarily agreeing with it. Revised this a bit.

PS, did you read that bit about how my DH's name change has been smooth and problem free? No problems with the doctor's office, no medical billing rejections, no credit cards with a different name, etc. He even can file taxes with his meddlesome hyphenated name and he's never had problems with it. Magically, it's only a problem for those annoying WOMEN who hyphenate their names. I guess men do it so rarely that it's assumed it was his given name and therefore it should be treated as his actual name.

Still, there are like 3 million hits when I Google query "hyphen name field problems."

Whether it's a problem with American programmers or database design or whatever, it does cause problems.

You do get that you aren't going to win an argument with me

I'm not trying to win the argument or persuade you to anything. I noted that it was difficult to deal with on the database side and just posted other people's complaints on the issue.

But I also posted ripostes and it may indeed be an odd bit of male privilege wrapped in delicious coat of Anglo culture and reticence on the coding side to bend to the real-life issues.

You do get that you aren't going to win an argument with me

Revised when I realized you weren't actually trying to convince me I'm an annoying woman for using my own name. You *could* have framed the quotation better, but I won't quibble with you over that.

And sometimes doctors don't pay attention to their charts because I've been addressed as LastName, as if it were my first name or Ms. Allison as if that were my last name.

It's stupid that hyphenated names are treated as being weird. It's common enough, people need to build computers systems that deal with reality not just what once was easy.

Burrell I bet your right.

Revised when I realized you weren't actually trying to convince me I'm an annoying woman for using my own name. You *could* have framed the quotation better, but I won't quibble with you over that.

I was sort of feeling it out as I compared my experience to various complainy people on the issue.

I do think you're right that there are lot of unexamined cultural biases which make it more of a problem than it should be.

But, I'll just note that lots of institutions use out-of-the-box type database setups and the way the name fields are constructed and the way Access and MySQL deal with hyphens seems to cause problems.

(I'd be curious to hear how high level users like ita or Scola or tommyrot have dealt with the issue.)

At least people who are choosing to hyphenate their names should understand that as things currently stand, it will likely be problematic in dealing with things like insurance and medical offices or HR.

PS, did you read that bit about how my DH's name change has been smooth and problem free? No problems with the doctor's office, no medical billing rejections, no credit cards with a different name, etc. He even can file taxes with his meddlesome hyphenated name and he's never had problems with it. Magically, it's only a problem for those annoying WOMEN who hyphenate their names. I guess men do it so rarely that it's assumed it was his given name and therefore it should be treated as his actual name.

I don't know why that would be. The name field isn't gendered, so the hyphen issue should be the same for anybody.

As Hil notes, even names like O'Brien and van der Steen cause problems because most databases want to force Initial Caps on a name field.

On the one hand, this is really just a technical issue on the database side where you want to have the least amount of exceptions and you want to create datafields which are less prone to error on entry (so they force initial caps, or number fields etc.)

On the other hand, there are computer programmers in Colombia and The Netherlands who have to deal with last names which are not Jane Smith. So it's an unexamined cultural bias which winds up causing more trouble than people expect.

As a side note, it was boggling to me that when EM and I split up that the school databases could not accommodate the fact that Emmett had two home addresses. But that was the case. They invested millions in some database which presumed single-home families despite all the reality which contravened that. And once those systems are in place they're very difficult to tweak or adjust.

Personally, I have really resented the patriarchal assumption that women should change their name when they marry. This is something that has bothered me nearly my whole life.

I remember an argument I got into in high school with a teacher and another girl after I said I'd never change my last name. I was told loftily I'd feel differently after I fell in love, I'd WANT to change my name to his! I said, so then, if he loves me, why doesn't he change his name to mine? Oh, hilarity.

About the only wedding blog that I am 100% in love with is A Practical Wedding. Marvelous stuff, and has a lot of content about being a wife as well. Anyway, the woman who runs it has always wanted her hypothetical future husband to take her name. And then she met her now-husband, and when they were discussing it, he said no, he'd prefer to keep his, so they each kept theirs. Anyway, she says that whenever she tells people she wanted her husband to take her name, they laugh. They think it's a hilarious fucking joke. Gah.

But not only will my last name change, but my Ms. changes to Mrs.

Wait, isn't the point of "Ms." that it doesn't denote marriage status (as opposed to Miss v. Mrs.)

Yeah, I could go by Ms. HisLastname, but that doesn't feel right, since I will be gaining HisLastname by virtue of, indeed, being a missus.

Some of my friends were adamant about keeping their fathers' names. I've always missed the point of that, from a feminism stance--your father's name, your husband's name--it still a male relative's name.

But it's not just my father's name. I'm almost 42. It's MY name. I have lived in it, gotten a degree with it, published with it, worked with it, Tim says he can only think of me as Stephanie Lang. Not "Stephanie HerDadsName." It came from my dad, that's true, and I share it with him (but also with my mother, who kept it after the divorce so she would have the same name as her kids); this is not a society where names traditionally come from the mother. But the fact remains that it is, unquestionably, MY name.