12 ms·

The government ate my name

154 points by notok 1y ago

c0balt 1y ago
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 http://archive.today/5h4v2
- ninalanyon 1y ago
  > The government being this sloppy at getting accents right is surprising, I would expect them to value accuracy That tells me you're German, I didn't even need to see the ä and ß. Even in the UK I encounter websites that won't accept my Norwegian address because it begins with Å. English speaking countries generally are pretty bad at this sort of thing.
  - dcminter 1y ago
    Last time I tried to make an international transfer from my British bank account it couldn't accept destination names with any accented characters. An international transfer. Sheesh.
  - reorder9695 1y ago
    You'd think the UK would be alright with it given Irish names are and were reasonably common (at least in parts of the UK), which commonly have fadas in them (i.e. Béibhinn, Seán, Ciarán, etc)
    - miki123211 1y ago
      I mean, English itself has diacritics in perfectly ordinary words that many Americans use every day (café, résumé, and yet somebody decided to put "useless" characters like @, ^ or # in ASCII instead.
      - TinkersW 1y ago
        They are optional though, and who can be bothered to add that when typing.
      - int_19h 1y ago
        ^ comes from typewriters, where it was used to type letters like â by backing the caret and typing over the last letter. Similarly ' could be used for acute accent - hence why it didn't get a separate letter - and ` for grave accent. By the way, the accents can often be used to force the right pronunciation of a foreign name on native speakers (at least in US, where Spanish names are so widespread). So e.g. use "á" if you want it to be pronounced [a] etc.
  - QuantumNomad_ 1y ago
    Just because we have æ, ø, å here in Norway doesn’t mean that we’re much better at handling “weird” characters from other countries than the English speaking countries are. My Spanish girlfriend has an ñ in her last name, and as does our son. To the people here in Norway, I just tell them to put a plain n when typing the last name. It’s easier to just go with that than to try and get people to understand how to type ñ on the keyboard (even though our computers can do it), and to avoid extra back and forth with people who have systems that don’t handle it. Likewise, when I’m in Spain I don’t bother to say that my last name has ø in it. I don’t even bother to rewrite the o in my last name as oe. I just put it as o. The only situation where I put it as oe is indirectly when an airline converts ø to oe on my airline ticket, or where the airline system doesn’t handle ø and I put it as oe for them when making the booking. To me my name looks worse with oe in it, and seems harder to pronounce for people if I write it as having oe in it than just putting it as o.
    - ninalanyon 1y ago
      I'm not talking about ordinary members of the public not bothering to figure out how to type an unusual character on a Norwegian keyboard. I have no idea how I would type a an n with a tilde, I would have to pick it from the character map. My point was that someone who can type it will often have it rejected by a website. I was using a hotel booking site and when I booked a room it asked me for my address so I typed Å... The web page rendered it correctly but when I hit the button to complete the transaction it told me that my address contained an illegal character (or some similar wording). And this site handles bookings for hotels that themselves have names with umlauts, tildes, cedillas, etc.
- comrade1234 1y ago
  The USA government can't even handle ü. I was filling out a simple form to replace my damaged passport. I live in Zürich but it couldn't handle the umlaut. I never know what to do in this situation - do I use 'ue' instead, which is most common in Europe, or do I just use 'u' which is wrong but usually works in America. I didn't even bother checking with 'ue' and just went with 'u' Ü isn't even a special character or utf-8 - ü is part of ascii. How does this even fail? Is their database a 7-bit database?
  - nemomarx 1y ago
    if they can't type it on a keyboard when manually copying it from one place to another they'll drop it is what I've come to expect.
  - pixl97 1y ago
    Don't think of government ascii as the entire ascii code page. Instead think of it as what's on a typewriter. You get 0-9 and A-Z along with a few punctuation characters.
    - krior 1y ago
      Not very helpful - my typewriter has an ü :)
      - pixl97 1y ago
        And I'm sure Chinese typewriters have a totally different charset then German ones.
      - marcellus23 1y ago
        But do American English typewriters have a ü?
  - technothrasher 1y ago
    Heck, they can't even handle that my last name has more than one capital letter in it.
  - 1y ago
- Y_Y 1y ago
  I know these characters now have lives of their own, but they emerged as shorthands for "ae" and "ss" respectively (where the first s was the long kind that looks like an 'f'). My understanding is that they are still phonetically entirely equivalent. How does it feel to have to substitute them into your name? (Or do you have a different recourse?)
  - c0balt 1y ago
    > How does it feel to have to substitute them into your name? It does not directly bother me but can lead to downstream inconveniences. Public services (in Germany) ime don't like mismatches in identifiers, especially inconsistent ones. If it is required then it might sometimes take more than one application (with a small explanation on why the mismatch is there). As another example, if ä is substituted for ae in shipping addresses then automatic tracking for packages by DHL via my customer account breaks (as the address is not identical anymore).
- Aloisius 1y ago
  A clean paper trail is only possible if everyone always enters your name in exactly how you spell it. That's not realistic though. If you try spelling your name over the phone to an American government employee, the vast majority would have no idea what a eszett was or how to enter it. Even if you wrote ß on a form, most wouldn't be able to enter it. Nor would most know how to pronounce it. Even for accented letters like ä which at least have a form someone might recognize, the sheer number of different accent marks used across languages and the difficulty in reading someone's handwriting and general unfamiliarity with foreign names is just asking for some clerk to enter in wrong. And that's just names with Latin letters. It becomes infinitely worse once you start including all the other character in world languages. Instead, US government databases usually have first and last names transliterated into uppercase non-accented letters and they match against the transliterated name. Middle names are often only for display purposes. If you're lucky, they'll be display versions of first and last as well where you might sometimes be able to stick an accented character. This isn't really limited to the US either. If you look at any passport, you'll notice the machine-readable section does the exact same thing, so on German passports ß becomes SS and Ä becomes AE.
- 6SixTy 1y ago
  Don't completely rule out EBCDIC from the equation. It's generally an IBM-ism meant for punched cards with the same characters as ASCII. Despite the similarity, it means that it's a legacy system kept alive to now and switching to UTF-EBCDIC would likely incur disturbing 70+ year old layers of tech debt dust. Some of them don't even support lower case characters as it's using EBCDIC's predecessor, BCD.
  - miki123211 1y ago
    And this is even the case in Europe. There was a case of some German bank treating ü as "ue", its typical ASCII transliteration. A customer complained under GDPR and won.
- AndriyKunitsyn 1y ago
  It's a question of scope, though. Imagine you are an American designing a system. What about non-Latin alphabets? Yeah, these should probably be converted, nobody's going to bother with those. What about Hungarians, should we care about their O / Ó / Ö / Ő and U / Ú / Ü / Ű? And Icelanders - should we allow their Ð / Þ? I understand that seeing your name misspelled hurts, but pretending ASCII is enough for everyone is an understandable simplification.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    ASCII isn't even enough for English. And yes absolutely we should bring Ð / Þ back for English use and drop those ridiculous digraphs.
- Rendello 1y ago
  I saw online that people moving to Japan can sometimes take months to get a bank account because the systems aren't there designed to handle middle names. If you want to maximize your child's ability to move around, I guess go with an ASCII first name-last name, which works almost everywhere. Except Iceland!
pavel_lishin 1y ago
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.
- nradov 1y ago
  As a related issue, some Slavic language countries require foreign documents to be transliterated into the Cyrillic alphabet, which doesn't contain exact equivalents for certain English alphabet letters. They usually end up using the closest phonetic equivalent but this often causes bureaucratic hassles.
  - pavel_lishin 1y ago
    Now I'm trying to figure out how one would write out Matthew in Cyrillic, which has two phonemes that are as much of a nightmare for Russian-speakers as "ы" and "р" are for English-speakers. "Мэтью", maybe?
    - bombcar 1y ago
      Do you go with the phonetic option, or do you just use the Cyrillic for the name of the writer of the Gospel? (It's a more general question, too, is John Juan when he's in Mexico?)
technothrasher 1y ago
> Famous people named Fenech include [...] What? No love for Paul Fenech from "Fat Pizza"?
- emmelaich 1y ago
  I first thought of Jeff Fenech the boxer. Surely more famous.
dustincoates 1y ago
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.
- pavel_lishin 1y ago
  Samesies; when I moved to Texas, people put the accent in my name on the wrong syllable, but after awhile that began to sound more natural than my name with the accent in the correct place but with an American accent. "PAYvel" sounds worse to me than "PahVEL", so I go by the latter - presumably fucking it up for every Pavel that comes into these people's lives after me.
  - rkomorn 1y ago
    What gets me is the people who decide not to call me by the name I specifically introduce myself with. I have a nasal vowel in my name that, so far in my life, only French and Portuguese speakers have pronounced properly. I learned English in the US young enough that no one guesses I'm not native, and I anglicized my name so that it could be pronounced easily. It is what I go by. I introduce myself with this adopted pronunciation. People often ask me how to pronounce it in French, so I tell them, but reiterate that I go by the anglicized pronunciation. Inevitably, those folks start using their wrong attempt at French and I have to correct them and tell them I go by the anglicized pronunciation. Edit: strong feelings had, obviously.
    - pavel_lishin 1y ago
      Yeah. Every time someone asks me, "but how do you really pronounce it", I do a big internal sigh and resign myself to the next 10 minutes being a useless pronunciation lesson.
      - rkomorn 1y ago
        And when they somehow come away satisfied that their wrong pronunciation works... ugh. I will say though, I'm perfectly fine with people not being able to pronounce my name, and I do expect the same courtesy in return. I'll give it my best shot, but if it's not happening, it's just not happening.
fguerraz 1y ago
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.
jrockway 1y ago
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.
cidd 1y ago
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.
- toast0 1y ago
  Or you get something like Someone FNU. Where FNU at some point meant 'first name unknown', but is now the person's last name at least in the people I've known... But I see references to it ending up as their firstname, so FNU Someone, which would make a little more sense, but is still pretty bizarre. Someone Someone seems like the best way to handle it, assuming single names aren't allowed (because yeah)
- ricudis 1y ago
  Nowadays the Indonesian law requires at least two words for the person's full name, and the full name is regarded as a single entity no matter how many words it contains. Older generations of Javanese, having only a single name, usually duplicate it - I have seen such duplicate names in official Indonesian documents.
klipt 1y ago
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).
kstrauser 1y ago
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.
- thewebguyd 1y ago
  > My favorite part is that we have to run an official notice ad in the local newspaper For anyone else curious about the legal name change process in the US, this varies depending on state. I legally changed my name doing it the court process way. My state didn't require the newspaper thing. Was just $83 to file and show up at the hearing, and it was done. Where it gets really fun is I have an apostraphe in my last name, and in 2025 we still can't make web forms that handle it. Some allow it, some don't, and it causes mismatch issues all of the time.
  - kstrauser 1y ago
    Yeah, it's a total patchwork of laws and processes. It's enough of a pain in the neck here to make you have to be pretty sure you want to bother with it. I can only imagine the "fun" you're having dealing with that, Mr. O'DropTables.
dzhiurgis 1y ago
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)...
- eythian 1y ago
  In NZ there are restrictions on what you can't name a child (titles that represent royalty e.g. "king" or certain positions, e.g. "justice", or ones that can lead to excessive mockery, e.g. "sex fruit"), but the line seems to be hazy as "Number 16 Bus Shelter" was apparently permitted. As for legally renaming yourself, I really don't know if the same rules apply. Probably the title-related ones, or ones that could be offensive, but I'd expect that's about it. But just getting called whatever you like isn't a problem. I know quite a few people who don't go by their legal first name.
palmotea 1y ago
> 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.
inopinatus 1y ago
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.
- testing22321 1y ago
  An Aussie friend has a hyphenated last name and has had so many headaches in her life due to it she made everyone she knew swear they wouldn’t inflict that on their future children
  - skissane 1y ago
    Some cousins of mine have hyphenated surnames (Mothers-Fathers)... but in practice they just go by their mother's surname, only on official paperwork do they use their father's too. They aren't disowning their father's surname–they aren't estranged from him or anything, their parents are still together–they just prefer it this way.
buu700 1y ago
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.
prmoustache 1y ago
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.
LeoPanthera 1y ago
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.
angarg12 1y ago
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.
- ZPrimed 1y ago
  If I saw your name in a CRM system, as a USican, I would assume that some dumbass on my team accidentally pasted your last name into the field twice.
msla 1y ago
> 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.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  I've come around to arguing for "name" to just be a text field. No rules. But so many people seem to think their systems need surname, firstname, middle name, etc. all separated. I rarely see an actual need for this. If you want to know what to call them informally, have that be a separate field that you prompt them for.
  - msla 1y ago
    > I've come around to arguing for "name" to just be a text field. No rules. This is the morally correct solution, but governments run on forms and forms run on fields and fields were created by people who knew, as a matter of absolute ontological certainty, that names are FIRST MIDDLE-INITIAL LAST with a possibly blank MIDDLE-INITIAL. As for letters, if it isn't on Ethel's typewriter it doesn't exist. If you want to protest the form, line forms over there, face-down, nine-edge first.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  > 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 These lists are called “Falsehoods programmers believe about...” because ultimately, when the rubber meets the road, it’s a programmer who makes the decision to type it in, implement it, and ultimately cause the problem. Maybe, to be more accurate, the lists should be called “Falsehoods programmers perpetuate by not pushing back against clients and product managers.”
Sohcahtoa82 1y ago
> 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.
- adastra22 1y ago
  Yes I just traveled domestically. Real ID was required.
  - testing22321 1y ago
    Does a passport still work?
    - kstrauser 1y ago
      Yes.
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  The final rule on REAL ID published earlier this year announced a 2-year phased implementation option for federal agencies. There were some indications at the that TSA intended to use that option for air travel, though no information on specific phased implementation plans was ever released, and the full enforcement at the May 7 date was implemented. This is probably the source of confusion (though such a basic fact, 5 months after the full enforcement date, should not have been missed.)
noduerme 1y ago
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?
Nio1024 1y ago
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.
- geek_lean 1y ago
  The real insight here isn't about interoperability—it's that we've been treating identity as a data integrity problem when it's actually a semantic mapping problem. Giovanni's "F" isn't a bug, it's a feature of systems designed around Anglo naming conventions trying to force-fit multicultural reality into rigid schemas. Even perfect APIs won't solve this. Names carry cultural context that gets lost in translation between bureaucratic systems. We need identity architectures that embrace semantic ambiguity rather than eliminate it. What would a name system look like if it was designed for a multicultural world from the ground up?
mcv 1y ago
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.
- eythian 1y ago
  In NZ someone I know has a single name. Due to the constraints of the system, effectively he has no first name and only a surname. In things where a first and last name are required (I think the drivers licence system needed it), he uses "citizen" as a filler. It can go the other extreme too of course: https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/360848808/worlds-longest-name-meet-kiwi-who-owns-record https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/360848808/worlds-longest-nam...
  - skissane 1y ago
    I used to work for a university in Australia, our solution to mononymous students was to put their single name in both first name and surname fields. So if your name was just Mayawati, we'd put you down as Mayawati Mayawati. Some US bureaucrats seem to like FNU (First Name Unknown) or LNU (Last Name Unknown). So one encounters mononymous Americans whose first name is Fnu or last name is Lnu. A while back I had a coworker whose surname was Fnu – I believe her legal paperwork had Fnu as her first name, but she got IT to swap her firstname and lastname in our corporate systems, because she didn't want people addressing her as Fnu.
- cwmma 1y ago
  In America (well in my state, everywhere does it slightly differently) you can't really give people multiple middle names, all you really do is give them a single middle name with a space in it. source: gave my children fancy names
Galanwe 1y ago
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.
- rkomorn 1y ago
  If it makes you feel any better; I have no middle name, and fairly short first and last (6 letters each). My names have been consistently misspelled regardless.
ricudis 1y ago
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-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
akk0 1y ago
My partner has a first name like XXXdr, which an airline at some point turned into "Dr. XXX".
ratmeadow 1y ago
I don't get why various governments/systems/etc have an obsession with the first name + last name format. It just has so many assumptions that fall over so quickly. Why can't we treat name as a single, generally opaque field and leave it at that? Exactly whose day is being ruined by not having a perfectly sanitised first name and last name?
6510 1y ago
I know a guy with just one name. He puts it in both the first and second name field. I vaguely remember a story of a family migrating though different writing systems all ending up with different names.
cwmma 1y ago
Reading this, it seems like the naturalization process which he changed his name during, doesn't really signal that there was a change of names. Like normally if you changed your name (in America) you'd have a wedding certificate or a document from the court that you could use to show continuity but instead you're just allowed to put whatever you want on the citizenship form?

154 points by notok 1y ago

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 http://archive.today/5h4v2

ninalanyon 1y ago
> The government being this sloppy at getting accents right is surprising, I would expect them to value accuracy That tells me you're German, I didn't even need to see the ä and ß. Even in the UK I encounter websites that won't accept my Norwegian address because it begins with Å. English speaking countries generally are pretty bad at this sort of thing.
- dcminter 1y ago
  Last time I tried to make an international transfer from my British bank account it couldn't accept destination names with any accented characters. An international transfer. Sheesh.
- reorder9695 1y ago
  You'd think the UK would be alright with it given Irish names are and were reasonably common (at least in parts of the UK), which commonly have fadas in them (i.e. Béibhinn, Seán, Ciarán, etc)
  - miki123211 1y ago
    I mean, English itself has diacritics in perfectly ordinary words that many Americans use every day (café, résumé, and yet somebody decided to put "useless" characters like @, ^ or # in ASCII instead.
    - TinkersW 1y ago
      They are optional though, and who can be bothered to add that when typing.
    - int_19h 1y ago
      ^ comes from typewriters, where it was used to type letters like â by backing the caret and typing over the last letter. Similarly ' could be used for acute accent - hence why it didn't get a separate letter - and ` for grave accent. By the way, the accents can often be used to force the right pronunciation of a foreign name on native speakers (at least in US, where Spanish names are so widespread). So e.g. use "á" if you want it to be pronounced [a] etc.
- QuantumNomad_ 1y ago
  Just because we have æ, ø, å here in Norway doesn’t mean that we’re much better at handling “weird” characters from other countries than the English speaking countries are. My Spanish girlfriend has an ñ in her last name, and as does our son. To the people here in Norway, I just tell them to put a plain n when typing the last name. It’s easier to just go with that than to try and get people to understand how to type ñ on the keyboard (even though our computers can do it), and to avoid extra back and forth with people who have systems that don’t handle it. Likewise, when I’m in Spain I don’t bother to say that my last name has ø in it. I don’t even bother to rewrite the o in my last name as oe. I just put it as o. The only situation where I put it as oe is indirectly when an airline converts ø to oe on my airline ticket, or where the airline system doesn’t handle ø and I put it as oe for them when making the booking. To me my name looks worse with oe in it, and seems harder to pronounce for people if I write it as having oe in it than just putting it as o.
  - ninalanyon 1y ago
    I'm not talking about ordinary members of the public not bothering to figure out how to type an unusual character on a Norwegian keyboard. I have no idea how I would type a an n with a tilde, I would have to pick it from the character map. My point was that someone who can type it will often have it rejected by a website. I was using a hotel booking site and when I booked a room it asked me for my address so I typed Å... The web page rendered it correctly but when I hit the button to complete the transaction it told me that my address contained an illegal character (or some similar wording). And this site handles bookings for hotels that themselves have names with umlauts, tildes, cedillas, etc.
comrade1234 1y ago
The USA government can't even handle ü. I was filling out a simple form to replace my damaged passport. I live in Zürich but it couldn't handle the umlaut. I never know what to do in this situation - do I use 'ue' instead, which is most common in Europe, or do I just use 'u' which is wrong but usually works in America. I didn't even bother checking with 'ue' and just went with 'u' Ü isn't even a special character or utf-8 - ü is part of ascii. How does this even fail? Is their database a 7-bit database?
- nemomarx 1y ago
  if they can't type it on a keyboard when manually copying it from one place to another they'll drop it is what I've come to expect.
- pixl97 1y ago
  Don't think of government ascii as the entire ascii code page. Instead think of it as what's on a typewriter. You get 0-9 and A-Z along with a few punctuation characters.
  - krior 1y ago
    Not very helpful - my typewriter has an ü :)
    - pixl97 1y ago
      And I'm sure Chinese typewriters have a totally different charset then German ones.
    - marcellus23 1y ago
      But do American English typewriters have a ü?
- technothrasher 1y ago
  Heck, they can't even handle that my last name has more than one capital letter in it.
- 1y ago
Y_Y 1y ago
I know these characters now have lives of their own, but they emerged as shorthands for "ae" and "ss" respectively (where the first s was the long kind that looks like an 'f'). My understanding is that they are still phonetically entirely equivalent. How does it feel to have to substitute them into your name? (Or do you have a different recourse?)
- c0balt 1y ago
  > How does it feel to have to substitute them into your name? It does not directly bother me but can lead to downstream inconveniences. Public services (in Germany) ime don't like mismatches in identifiers, especially inconsistent ones. If it is required then it might sometimes take more than one application (with a small explanation on why the mismatch is there). As another example, if ä is substituted for ae in shipping addresses then automatic tracking for packages by DHL via my customer account breaks (as the address is not identical anymore).
Aloisius 1y ago
A clean paper trail is only possible if everyone always enters your name in exactly how you spell it. That's not realistic though. If you try spelling your name over the phone to an American government employee, the vast majority would have no idea what a eszett was or how to enter it. Even if you wrote ß on a form, most wouldn't be able to enter it. Nor would most know how to pronounce it. Even for accented letters like ä which at least have a form someone might recognize, the sheer number of different accent marks used across languages and the difficulty in reading someone's handwriting and general unfamiliarity with foreign names is just asking for some clerk to enter in wrong. And that's just names with Latin letters. It becomes infinitely worse once you start including all the other character in world languages. Instead, US government databases usually have first and last names transliterated into uppercase non-accented letters and they match against the transliterated name. Middle names are often only for display purposes. If you're lucky, they'll be display versions of first and last as well where you might sometimes be able to stick an accented character. This isn't really limited to the US either. If you look at any passport, you'll notice the machine-readable section does the exact same thing, so on German passports ß becomes SS and Ä becomes AE.
6SixTy 1y ago
Don't completely rule out EBCDIC from the equation. It's generally an IBM-ism meant for punched cards with the same characters as ASCII. Despite the similarity, it means that it's a legacy system kept alive to now and switching to UTF-EBCDIC would likely incur disturbing 70+ year old layers of tech debt dust. Some of them don't even support lower case characters as it's using EBCDIC's predecessor, BCD.
- miki123211 1y ago
  And this is even the case in Europe. There was a case of some German bank treating ü as "ue", its typical ASCII transliteration. A customer complained under GDPR and won.
AndriyKunitsyn 1y ago
It's a question of scope, though. Imagine you are an American designing a system. What about non-Latin alphabets? Yeah, these should probably be converted, nobody's going to bother with those. What about Hungarians, should we care about their O / Ó / Ö / Ő and U / Ú / Ü / Ű? And Icelanders - should we allow their Ð / Þ? I understand that seeing your name misspelled hurts, but pretending ASCII is enough for everyone is an understandable simplification.
- int_19h 1y ago
  ASCII isn't even enough for English. And yes absolutely we should bring Ð / Þ back for English use and drop those ridiculous digraphs.
Rendello 1y ago
I saw online that people moving to Japan can sometimes take months to get a bank account because the systems aren't there designed to handle middle names. If you want to maximize your child's ability to move around, I guess go with an ASCII first name-last name, which works almost everywhere. Except Iceland!

pavel_lishin 1y ago

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.

nradov 1y ago
As a related issue, some Slavic language countries require foreign documents to be transliterated into the Cyrillic alphabet, which doesn't contain exact equivalents for certain English alphabet letters. They usually end up using the closest phonetic equivalent but this often causes bureaucratic hassles.
- pavel_lishin 1y ago
  Now I'm trying to figure out how one would write out Matthew in Cyrillic, which has two phonemes that are as much of a nightmare for Russian-speakers as "ы" and "р" are for English-speakers. "Мэтью", maybe?
  - bombcar 1y ago
    Do you go with the phonetic option, or do you just use the Cyrillic for the name of the writer of the Gospel? (It's a more general question, too, is John Juan when he's in Mexico?)

technothrasher 1y ago

> Famous people named Fenech include [...] What? No love for Paul Fenech from "Fat Pizza"?

emmelaich 1y ago
I first thought of Jeff Fenech the boxer. Surely more famous.

dustincoates 1y ago

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.

pavel_lishin 1y ago
Samesies; when I moved to Texas, people put the accent in my name on the wrong syllable, but after awhile that began to sound more natural than my name with the accent in the correct place but with an American accent. "PAYvel" sounds worse to me than "PahVEL", so I go by the latter - presumably fucking it up for every Pavel that comes into these people's lives after me.
- rkomorn 1y ago
  What gets me is the people who decide not to call me by the name I specifically introduce myself with. I have a nasal vowel in my name that, so far in my life, only French and Portuguese speakers have pronounced properly. I learned English in the US young enough that no one guesses I'm not native, and I anglicized my name so that it could be pronounced easily. It is what I go by. I introduce myself with this adopted pronunciation. People often ask me how to pronounce it in French, so I tell them, but reiterate that I go by the anglicized pronunciation. Inevitably, those folks start using their wrong attempt at French and I have to correct them and tell them I go by the anglicized pronunciation. Edit: strong feelings had, obviously.
  - pavel_lishin 1y ago
    Yeah. Every time someone asks me, "but how do you really pronounce it", I do a big internal sigh and resign myself to the next 10 minutes being a useless pronunciation lesson.
    - rkomorn 1y ago
      And when they somehow come away satisfied that their wrong pronunciation works... ugh. I will say though, I'm perfectly fine with people not being able to pronounce my name, and I do expect the same courtesy in return. I'll give it my best shot, but if it's not happening, it's just not happening.

fguerraz 1y ago

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.

jrockway 1y ago

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.

cidd 1y ago

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.

toast0 1y ago
Or you get something like Someone FNU. Where FNU at some point meant 'first name unknown', but is now the person's last name at least in the people I've known... But I see references to it ending up as their firstname, so FNU Someone, which would make a little more sense, but is still pretty bizarre. Someone Someone seems like the best way to handle it, assuming single names aren't allowed (because yeah)
ricudis 1y ago
Nowadays the Indonesian law requires at least two words for the person's full name, and the full name is regarded as a single entity no matter how many words it contains. Older generations of Javanese, having only a single name, usually duplicate it - I have seen such duplicate names in official Indonesian documents.

klipt 1y ago

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).

kstrauser 1y ago

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.

thewebguyd 1y ago
> My favorite part is that we have to run an official notice ad in the local newspaper For anyone else curious about the legal name change process in the US, this varies depending on state. I legally changed my name doing it the court process way. My state didn't require the newspaper thing. Was just $83 to file and show up at the hearing, and it was done. Where it gets really fun is I have an apostraphe in my last name, and in 2025 we still can't make web forms that handle it. Some allow it, some don't, and it causes mismatch issues all of the time.
- kstrauser 1y ago
  Yeah, it's a total patchwork of laws and processes. It's enough of a pain in the neck here to make you have to be pretty sure you want to bother with it. I can only imagine the "fun" you're having dealing with that, Mr. O'DropTables.

dzhiurgis 1y ago

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)...

eythian 1y ago
In NZ there are restrictions on what you can't name a child (titles that represent royalty e.g. "king" or certain positions, e.g. "justice", or ones that can lead to excessive mockery, e.g. "sex fruit"), but the line seems to be hazy as "Number 16 Bus Shelter" was apparently permitted. As for legally renaming yourself, I really don't know if the same rules apply. Probably the title-related ones, or ones that could be offensive, but I'd expect that's about it. But just getting called whatever you like isn't a problem. I know quite a few people who don't go by their legal first name.

palmotea 1y ago

> 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.

inopinatus 1y ago

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.

testing22321 1y ago
An Aussie friend has a hyphenated last name and has had so many headaches in her life due to it she made everyone she knew swear they wouldn’t inflict that on their future children
- skissane 1y ago
  Some cousins of mine have hyphenated surnames (Mothers-Fathers)... but in practice they just go by their mother's surname, only on official paperwork do they use their father's too. They aren't disowning their father's surname–they aren't estranged from him or anything, their parents are still together–they just prefer it this way.

buu700 1y ago

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.

prmoustache 1y ago

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.

LeoPanthera 1y ago

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.

angarg12 1y ago

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.

ZPrimed 1y ago
If I saw your name in a CRM system, as a USican, I would assume that some dumbass on my team accidentally pasted your last name into the field twice.

msla 1y ago

> 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.

SoftTalker 1y ago
I've come around to arguing for "name" to just be a text field. No rules. But so many people seem to think their systems need surname, firstname, middle name, etc. all separated. I rarely see an actual need for this. If you want to know what to call them informally, have that be a separate field that you prompt them for.
- msla 1y ago
  > I've come around to arguing for "name" to just be a text field. No rules. This is the morally correct solution, but governments run on forms and forms run on fields and fields were created by people who knew, as a matter of absolute ontological certainty, that names are FIRST MIDDLE-INITIAL LAST with a possibly blank MIDDLE-INITIAL. As for letters, if it isn't on Ethel's typewriter it doesn't exist. If you want to protest the form, line forms over there, face-down, nine-edge first.
ryandrake 1y ago
> 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 These lists are called “Falsehoods programmers believe about...” because ultimately, when the rubber meets the road, it’s a programmer who makes the decision to type it in, implement it, and ultimately cause the problem. Maybe, to be more accurate, the lists should be called “Falsehoods programmers perpetuate by not pushing back against clients and product managers.”

Sohcahtoa82 1y ago

> 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.

adastra22 1y ago
Yes I just traveled domestically. Real ID was required.
- testing22321 1y ago
  Does a passport still work?
  - kstrauser 1y ago
    Yes.
dragonwriter 1y ago
The final rule on REAL ID published earlier this year announced a 2-year phased implementation option for federal agencies. There were some indications at the that TSA intended to use that option for air travel, though no information on specific phased implementation plans was ever released, and the full enforcement at the May 7 date was implemented. This is probably the source of confusion (though such a basic fact, 5 months after the full enforcement date, should not have been missed.)

noduerme 1y ago

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?

Nio1024 1y ago

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.

geek_lean 1y ago
The real insight here isn't about interoperability—it's that we've been treating identity as a data integrity problem when it's actually a semantic mapping problem. Giovanni's "F" isn't a bug, it's a feature of systems designed around Anglo naming conventions trying to force-fit multicultural reality into rigid schemas. Even perfect APIs won't solve this. Names carry cultural context that gets lost in translation between bureaucratic systems. We need identity architectures that embrace semantic ambiguity rather than eliminate it. What would a name system look like if it was designed for a multicultural world from the ground up?

mcv 1y ago

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.

eythian 1y ago
In NZ someone I know has a single name. Due to the constraints of the system, effectively he has no first name and only a surname. In things where a first and last name are required (I think the drivers licence system needed it), he uses "citizen" as a filler. It can go the other extreme too of course: https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/360848808/worlds-longest-name-meet-kiwi-who-owns-record https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/360848808/worlds-longest-nam...
- skissane 1y ago
  I used to work for a university in Australia, our solution to mononymous students was to put their single name in both first name and surname fields. So if your name was just Mayawati, we'd put you down as Mayawati Mayawati. Some US bureaucrats seem to like FNU (First Name Unknown) or LNU (Last Name Unknown). So one encounters mononymous Americans whose first name is Fnu or last name is Lnu. A while back I had a coworker whose surname was Fnu – I believe her legal paperwork had Fnu as her first name, but she got IT to swap her firstname and lastname in our corporate systems, because she didn't want people addressing her as Fnu.
cwmma 1y ago
In America (well in my state, everywhere does it slightly differently) you can't really give people multiple middle names, all you really do is give them a single middle name with a space in it. source: gave my children fancy names

Galanwe 1y ago

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.

rkomorn 1y ago
If it makes you feel any better; I have no middle name, and fairly short first and last (6 letters each). My names have been consistently misspelled regardless.

ricudis 1y ago

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-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

akk0 1y ago

My partner has a first name like XXXdr, which an airline at some point turned into "Dr. XXX".

ratmeadow 1y ago

I don't get why various governments/systems/etc have an obsession with the first name + last name format. It just has so many assumptions that fall over so quickly. Why can't we treat name as a single, generally opaque field and leave it at that? Exactly whose day is being ruined by not having a perfectly sanitised first name and last name?

6510 1y ago

I know a guy with just one name. He puts it in both the first and second name field. I vaguely remember a story of a family migrating though different writing systems all ending up with different names.

cwmma 1y ago

Reading this, it seems like the naturalization process which he changed his name during, doesn't really signal that there was a change of names. Like normally if you changed your name (in America) you'd have a wedding certificate or a document from the court that you could use to show continuity but instead you're just allowed to put whatever you want on the citizenship form?