There's an analogous problem for Russians, and presumably folks from other Slavic-language countries. Our last names are gendered; if Ivan Kuznetsov marries Elena, her last name becomes Kuznetsova. (And their children would have gendered last names, too - little Borya Kuznetsov and little Masha Kuznetsova.)

So Russian families who move to America have a choice - either deal with people and systems who assume that married couples, and parents/children all have the same last name and hit roadblocks when that expectation does not match reality, or change one partner's last name to match the other's.

But that second option has problems too, because that name change doesn't retroactively apply in Russia - so now you might have American documents that say you're a Elena Kuznetsov, but your Russian documents say that you're Elena Kuznetsova - so any legal dealings that involve the two countries (like, say, traveling) become significantly more complicated because you need to prove that the two names actually point to the same person.

At least middle names aren't a big issue - patronymics mean something in Russia, but here in America it's just a string you pop into the "middle name" field, and maybe you get asked what it means, and get to teach someone what patronymic means.

Just taking this opportunity to vent.

When my wife and I married, she changed her name to [Her First Name] [Her Maiden Name] [My Last Name], like from

  First: Jane

  Middle: Ann

  Last: Smith

to

  First: Jane

  Middle: Smith

  Last: Mylastname

All was well and good until very recently when I was at the DMV with her and we were renewing her drivers license. We found out then that the person entering her name change form at the Social Security department had misentered it as

  First: Jane

  Middle: [none]

  Last: Smith Mylastname (no hyphen, just a space)

For fun, her US passport shows it correctly, like:

  Given names: Jane Smith

  Last: Mylastname

So two federal agencies have her name in two different ways. Yay! The DMV lady was unhappy with this but we talked her into accepting the truth on her passport so we could renew her license, but obviously you can't count on the cheerful disposition of all future DMV clerks. The correct long term answer is that we have to have her name changed legally, which will cost about $400 all told. My favorite part is that we have to run an official notice ad in the local newspaper, but that's just a plain templated text message that will read:

"Notice is given that Jane Smith Mylastname is changing her name to Jane Smith Mylastname"

for which privilege we get to pay $75.

Good grief.

Fairly usual stuff, I can relate to that!

I was born in France, I then had my last name changed to add my mother’s maiden name to my last name, and I can legally use either, my French id shows my name and my “usage name”.

Fast forward a few years, I settled in the UK, got naturalised, they dropped all the diacritics and kept only my “usage name” as my last name. You can also change name as many times as you like in the UK, they really don’t care, they’re pretty good at tracking it.

I then got my Italian citizenship by ancestry and there they’re the exact opposite of the British: only under very specific circumstances can you change your name, it has to be a matter of life and death pretty much. So they took my original French name, including the diacritics that nobody knows how to type on an Italian keyboard.

Now I live in Italy, with a different name than my British name, or my French “usage name”, and I have to explain to the clerks how to find me on their system (with my tax code) because they can’t type my name properly.

Not sure if that's of any comfort, but don't feel singled out: this naming issue happens _all the time_, in all countries, to everyone. I'm French, and had constant issues with naming and identification, whether I lived in western Europe, Eastern Europe, or Asia.

- I have acute (é) accents in my first and last name. This seems to create different problems for each system my name is interacting with. Sometimes the letters just disappear, sometimes it's replaced with 'e or e' because the clerk didn't know how to type é, sometimes the accent is just missing and becomes e, sometimes the clerk tries to be fancy and copy paste é in their system, but it only works locally and I then I'm named with �.

- French usually have a primary first name, 1 or 2 secondary first names, and a last name. In practice the additional first names are more or less used like American middle names, but legally speaking they are first names, there are no middle names in France. That means for most foreign countries where you can only have a single first name, it becomes the concatenation of all your first names. You are not "John" anymore, you are "John Bob Max", this is your first name from now on.

- Obviously concatenating first names creates stupidly long first names, so you will not really be "John Bob Max", but rather "John BM".

- I France when you have kids, you can decide for them to bear the father's name, the mother's name, or a concatenation of both. That concatenation can only be done with a space though, as hyphen-separated names are considered a single word. Most countries (e.g. Canada) have conflicting rules on this, meaning they will forcefully replace hyphens with spaces and vice versa.

- Overall clerks (in Europe especially) are not careful with inputting names in their systems. I would estimate 60% of the time, my name is spelled wrong (typo, character swap, localization, etc). This of course becomes ridiculous as countries are more and more trying to automate a lot of processes, but a single letter mismatch sends you to administrative hell.

My strategy of recent years, which seems to work, is to be *relentless* of having your name right every single time. Drop the accents and non latin1 letters systematically, don't accept any typo, imprecision or shortening, have your full first, middle and last names everywhere.

99% of the time the issues are because the operator/clerk don't want to bother, and think it won't be a huge deal. That's wrong, the snowball effect is real and painful. Once your name is wrong anywhere, it cascades in a nightmare quite quickly.

Interesting article, I've had some similar (though significantly less severe) experiences with having ä and ß in my names, it seems many U. S. companies are just unwilling/incapable of going beyond ASCII.

The government being this sloppy at getting accents right is surprising, I would expect them to value accuracy and a clean paper trail when handling names.

http://archive.today/5h4v2

Hah. The kicker of that story has a familiar ring.

My Dad used to own a liquor store back in the 70s, with his name on the sign (let's call it "Arthur's Liquor"). It was in a rough part of town. One day when I was a teenager, in the 90s, we were driving by and he saw the sign was still there, so he stopped and we went in. There's a Korean guy and his wife behind the counter.

Dad: Just wondering, who's Arthur?

Wife points to her husband.

Shop owner: Me. I'm Arthur.

Dad: No, I'm Arthur.

I'm just like, Dad, can we get out of here now?

The American presumption of having a single middle initial has always seemed weird to me. In NL, you can have as many names as you want, and some have a lot. Others have just a first and last name. I happen to have that single middle initial, but my wife and kids have two. Also, my wife's first name is not actually any of her legal names. Same with my dad and his brother and sister. "Calling name" is a common field on some official documents for this reason.

Most interesting case I've come across was a guy who just had one name. No surname or anything. He was once questioned by police (regarding a theft in the shop he worked in) and explained that his parents were "a bit weird". He was originally American, so apparently that's also a possibility there? And apparently the Dutch system allowed it, although the police seemed to struggle with it and may have duplicated his name.

Moving to a country that doesn't speak English has taught me just how many pronunciations of my last name there are. It's never really bothered me, though, and 90% of the time I'll introduce myself with the "wrong" one. It's easier for everyone.

> In response to 9/11, Congress had passed the REAL ID Act, requiring a new type of identification to board domestic flights [...] (It’s been postponed twice since then. The new deadline is now 2027, wink wink.)

For anyone reading this...this isn't true. It finally actually went into effect on May 7, 2025.

EDIT: I HAVE witnessed someone at a TSA checkpoint at an airport get turned away because they didn't have a REAL ID.

I'm hispanic and my two last names are Garcia Garcia. That is two last names that just happen to be the same.

When I moved to the US I could have dropped one or hyphenate them. I decided to keep it as-is, and use "Garcia Garcia" as my last name (space and all).

Besides confusing amongs americans and people always confusing one Garcia for middle name and one for last name, I had almost no problems. One time an airline messed up my plane ticket (again by dropping one of the Garcias) but that's it.

I appreciate other people have different experiences, I definitely met folks who have changed their names to conform to american customs and make things easier.

In Indonesia, many Javanese people traditionally have only one name. When they migrate to countries like Singapore, where a surname is required, they often use their given name as both their first and last name. As a result, you may see names such as Chandra Chandra or Supardi Supardi.

Interesting that he went from Giovanni to Joe. Giovanni is more directly cognate to John (both derive from Hebrew/Aramaic Yohanan via Greek Ioannes) while Joe is usually short for Joseph (Giuseppe in Italian, also from Hebrew).

I wonder what would happen if the author were to legally change his name from what's on his birth certificate (4 names) to his passport (3 names). Then when the documents don't match, you have a name change order that explains why. The explanation in this case is wrong, but it does give you a piece of legal paperwork accounting for the discrepancy that should satisfy most bureaucrats.

Of course, it's not fun to give up your identity and nobody should have to do that, but it might make it easier to exist in the American "you must have 3 names" world.

As a software engineer born outside the anglosphere, I am immensely cautious to have every formal record of my personal details byte-identical.

Obligatory read: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

I was born in the UK, but am now a US citizen.

My parents gave me two middle names. It's not that uncommon in the UK, but due to the length of my names, they don't all fit on a US passport. They force you to choose to truncate or omit some of them. OK, no problem.

But I also hold a UK passport, and the UK passport has a rule that your name must be the same on any other foreign identification, or they won't issue or re-issue a passport. Due to the US length limitation, this was impossible.

Renewing my UK passport wasn't impossible, but it was annoying. None of the automated methods worked, and I had to actually get someone on the phone so I could explain the problem.

Interesting read — and honestly, this isn’t unique to the U.S. or Mexico. Bureaucratic inefficiency and siloed systems seem to be universal in government operations. What’s missing isn’t just “digitization,” but true digital transformation — interoperable systems, shared data standards, and accountability built into the process.With AI advancing so fast, I wonder if we’ll see tools or frameworks that can actually help governments move past legacy workflows instead of just automating the same inefficiencies.

I have a kind of similar situation as I have 3 names and one surname but since birth I have always used and been called onky with my first name and surname, the 2 other names being useful to distinguish me from homonyms. Having moved to Spain, most entities (state, banks, insurances...) insist on moving my last name as a first surname. And many people call me using my second name and third name, including at work. It always sounds so strange to me and it takes me time to realise people are adressing me.

Example (not my real names): born as Alexander William Harry Smith, and having been called Alexander Smith all my life, people here in Spain unilaterally decide to call me William Harry or Don Harry all the time.

Thanksfully I have no need nor plan to apply for citizenship.

A few years ago I was unable to register a new Australian company via the automated systems because one of our directors has a hyphenated middle name and the various agencies concerned normalised this in differing ways, leading to rejection at a validation step. Resolving this turned a process of a few minutes into a multi-week telephonic saga.

I subsequently learned that many folks faced with the same problem simply didn’t bother and instead left intentionally erroneous/incomplete (but consistent, and thereby validating) data in the registers.

> I spent a few days at home weighing my options. Could my parents find other Mexican documents with my original name?

Keep your official documents, guys. Even if you think they're obsolete.

Reminds me of an old friend Oleshargegilolodeleroi* from Kenya who was renamed to "Siloma Kerore" on his US visa.

*: Not 100% sure I'm spelling that correctly. Grok suggests that Oleshargegilgilololdeleroi may be more plausible.

> In fact, authorities in New York never actually wrote down anyone’s name, they just checked each immigrant against the ship’s passenger list, which would have been compiled by employees of the steamship companies. That means that your grandpa Szymańczyk turned into Simmons before he even set foot on the boat.

So many people refuse to understand this. It's a fact they simply reject.

> I was born in Mexico City, and my parents named me Leonel Giovanni García Fenech. It might sound a little baroque to Americans, but having four names is standard in Spanish-speaking countries.

I'm as Anglo as they come, and I have four names. In practice, yeah, I often have to choose a middle name if a form has space for one (1) middle initial or middle name.

But all this hits upon something I don't like about the "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" article: Programmers usually don't believe things, programmers implement things, and those things will believe what the client believes, on pain of the client finding someone who will go along with their vision, no matter how grand, blinkered, purblind, or otherwise constrained that vision may be. Blaming programmers is, therefore, very often wrong.

My impression by living in NZ for a while now that I can call myself anything I want.

I've been asked to verify my identity only when setting up bank account, sorting out visa/tax with my sponsoring employer. After that it's only when leaving/entering country.

For my own convenience I use an english name to save barista butchering my name and feeling bad about it.

Naming kids was an exercise in linguistics. In Lithuanian we have some fun accidents like Justinas (just in ass) and Arminas (arm in ass)...

> Famous people named Fenech include [...]

What? No love for Paul Fenech from "Fat Pizza"?