November 20, 2008 at 4:38PM Things I hate: being asked for my title, given name, and surname in forms
It’s insane and culturally ignorant to do this. If you look at the way people’s names work you’ll notice that only a small, small number of people actually have names that fit into that format.
Take Irish names which include ‘O’ (such as “O’Hara” or “O Hara”, depending on preference) or ‘Mc’ (such as “McAllister”): I’ve seen names rejected because of the presence of the apostrophe, the ‘O’ treated like a middle initial, ‘Mc’ and ‘Mac’ treated like middle names, and the likes of “McAllister” normalised ignorantly to ‘Mcallister’. Or take the Irish form of the names ‘McGillacuddy’ and ‘McAleese’, which are ‘Mac Giolla Chuda’ and ‘Mac Giolla Iosa’: I’ll leave how they get mangled up to your imagination.
And then there’s double-barrel names. Spaniards must cringe at the way their names get mangled.
Hungarians too, seeing as they put their surname first and their given name after. Ditto for the Chinese, Japanese, and many other cultures.
Indonesians only have the one name. Yup, one name. Suck on that!
There’s only two sane things to do:
- Ask for their name, their whole name, and only their name,
- But if you really, really need to know how they prefer to be addressed, ask them that too, but make it optional.
Let’s take a simple example using my own name. I prefer to give my name as ‘Keith Gaughan’, and I prefer being addressed as ‘Keith’, not ‘Mr. Gaughan’ or any of that crap, but if I was 50 years of age, I might start to prefer that, or ‘Dr. Gaughan’, if I get a PhD in the future. Similarly, if I was to use my mother’s maiden name in my full name, it’d be ‘Keith Gaughan-McAllister’, but I might want to be referred to as ‘Mr. Gaughan’.
If you stick to either of these two schemes, you’ll be able asking people in a way that will work anywhere and won’t appear quite so ignorant or quasi-eurocentric.
Aside: I’m not giving any decent examples here for a very stupid reason: the idiot database driver on the server that hosts my site kills high-bit characters and doesn’t like UTF-8. Suckage.
Update: I remember finding this article ages back on the subject and agreeing vehemently. Take a read, it’s a good one.
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