On 10/11/2019 13:44, Doug wrote:
Au Contraire, Jens! In many local contexts you can normalize people's names. I
was born in Kansas, USA. My parents filled out a birth certificate for me. It
had a place on the form for first name, middle name, last name, and a suffix
like II or III.
That birth certificate form determined that everyone born in Kansas (at that
time), had a first, middle, and last name. There was no discussion of the
matter. That's the way it was. The form led the way; people never thought about
whether it was effective or not. Each newly-born child was given a first,
middle, and last name.
Effective was irrelevant for that system. There was no option, no alternative.
It simply was.
All systems are like that at each moment in time. They are what they are at any
moment in time, and they force the users to behave the way the system wants
them to behave. If you want to change the system and momentum is on your side,
then immediately you have a new system - at that moment in time. It is composed
of the old system and the momentum.
Back to names: just like the birth certificate, a system which assigns a name to you,
actually coerces you to have that name, because within that system, you exist as that
name. The "names" article is totally wrong when it says that each assumption is
wrong. Each of those assumptions is correct, and I can find at least one system which
makes each one correct. Within each system, the assumption works, and is valid.
My two cents...
Is not worth the paper it is written on!
So what happens when someone from a family who only uses first- and
last-names moves to Kansas?
Do they have to make up a middle-name so that he idiots can fill out the
forms?
Well, in the case of the US Navy back in the late 1980's, when a friend
of mine from here in Australia, who only has a first and last-name
married a USN pilot and moved to the USA, she was told that, "Yes, you
have a middle name." No amount of arguing, or producing of official
documents, (well, it's the USA, most people there don't know what a
passport is), could prevail. In the end she conceded defeat and became
<Jane> Doe <Smith>, for the duration.
Names are impossible, unless you use a free-form, infinite-length field,
you won't be safe, and even then, someone with turn up whose name is 'n'
recurring to an infinite number of characters or something!
Cheers,
Gary B-)
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