Really, REALLY unfortunate wedding announcements
Or, When NOT to Hyphenate Your Name. What’s my favorite? Best Lay? Wang Holder? Weener Whipple? Peters Rising? No, I can’t choose. Go see them all for yourself.
Speaking of names, I am inevitably going to have to become Mrs Uncle Badger or they won’t let me stay across the pond or get access to the wonderful National Health Service. I am, of course, proud and delighted to wear a family name associated with thousands of years of smelly, lice-ridden, bad tempered mustelids who live down holes and eat worms, but this does present me with a problem.
See, in the UK, a woman typically exchanges her husband’s last name for her own, keeping her same old given first and middle name. In the US, she takes his last name, drops her middle name and her own last name shifts over and becomes her new middle name. So I have a choice here.
To complicate matters, I have TWO middle names, and they’re corkers. My mama approached baby names and dog names in a similar spirit of mad hijinks and good clean fun. If I’d been born ten years later, in her commune days, I’m convinced I would have ended up Lemondrop Polythene Snickerdoodle Weasel. As it is, I got a melange of cornpone polysyllabic family names, something very like Stoaty Terwilliger Rothschild Weasel.
So do I follow the Brit tradition — Stoaty Terwilliger Rothschild Badger — and continue to sound like something that wandered boozily out of a Foghorn Leghorn cartoon to piss down your leg? Or do I go with the alternate, Stoaty Weasel Badger, and sound all classy and shit, like some kind of a fucking duchess already? (Don’t even suggest hyphenating the two. Stoaty don’t play that. I think that’s getting married with your fingers crossed behind your back).
I know y’all are going to be disappointed in me, but I’m leaning toward “duchess.” I’ve enjoyed my stupid name very much, but enough’s enough. I think I’ll play grownup for a while. I’m sick of being unable to fill out forms (try fitting “Terwilliger Rothschild” in the little space they leave for middle names) and having to spell it out for people.
But, man, would I ever love to be Crystal Butts McCracken.
September 20, 2007 — 8:20 am
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