[HN Gopher] The government ate my name
___________________________________________________________________
The government ate my name
Author : notok
Score : 67 points
Date : 2025-10-09 19:03 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (slate.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (slate.com)
| c0balt wrote:
| Interesting article, I've had some similar (though significantly
| less severe) experiences with having a 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
| ninalanyon wrote:
| > 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 a
| and ss.
|
| Even in the UK I encounter websites that won't accept my
| Norwegian address because it begins with A. English speaking
| countries generally are pretty bad at this sort of thing.
| dcminter wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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. Beibhinn, Sean,
| Ciaran, etc)
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| Just because we have ae, o, a 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 n 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 n 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 o 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 o to oe on my airline ticket, or where the
| airline system doesn't handle o 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.
| comrade1234 wrote:
| The USA government can't even handle u. I was filling out a
| simple form to replace my damaged passport. I live in Zurich
| 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'
|
| U isn't even a special character or utf-8 - u is part of ascii.
| How does this even fail? Is their database a 7-bit database?
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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.
| nemomarx wrote:
| 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.
| technothrasher wrote:
| Heck, they can't even handle that my last name has more than
| one capital letter in it.
| immibis wrote:
| u is not part of ascii. Are you thinking of latin-1?
| comrade1234 wrote:
| Oh that makes sense. ASCII is 7-bit. so they could be
| depending on old 7-bit databases.
| db48x wrote:
| No, they can only use what shows up on the keyboard.
| Internally the software is a vast mix of systems that in
| practice can probably handle unicode just fine by now.
| It's just that the people can't type any of those
| characters.
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| Option plus u on US English keyboard on macOS gives you
| the umlaut, and then hit u again and you have u.
|
| But I wouldn't bother memorising that and every other
| possible way that the other person has to press the keys
| depending on their keyboard layout and operating system.
| I'd just tell people to put u instead.
| integralid wrote:
| ASCII is a 7-bit code. U is not a part of ASCII any more than
| say L is (it's in one of many 8-bit extensions of ASCII)
| daemonologist wrote:
| There's no u in ASCII (the 1967 US-ASCII everyone thinks of,
| anyways, which is all you can expect from the government).
| It's in ISO 646:CH though, where it replaces '}', and in
| Latin 1.
| criddell wrote:
| 'u' isn't wrong in America. We spell it Zurich. And in China,
| it's Su Li Shi (or at least that's what Google tells me).
| umanwizard wrote:
| > U isn't even a special character or utf-8 - u is part of
| ascii
|
| That is not true. Type "man ascii" on macOS or Linux to see
| everything that is part of ascii.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > Is their database a 7-bit database?
|
| Ascii is 7 bits. What people think of as 8-bit ASCII is
| actually code page 437, the alternate characters added to the
| PC BIOS in the original IBM PC. Like UTF-8 it uses the most
| significant bit in a 1 byte ASCII char to determine if it
| should use a character from ASCII if 0 or the extended 437
| characters which includes u if 1.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437
| Y_Y wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 a 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 wrote:
| 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 a 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 A
| becomes AE.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 "y" and "r" are for
| English-speakers. "Met'iu", maybe?
| bombcar wrote:
| 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?)
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| > is John Juan when he's in Mexico?
|
| For the biblical Jesus, the situation is even worse. His
| name was probably originally yeshv'`a, and should
| therefore have been Yeshua to us users of the modern day
| Latin alphabet. But instead his name was adapted to Greek
| linguistic conventions as Iesous (Iesous), and from there
| transliterated into Jesus.
| xg15 wrote:
| This sounds as if it could slowly erode the whole "gendered
| surname" concept even in the origin countries (e.g. Russia)
|
| If you can treat the gendered name simply as a grammatical
| construct, things are easy - and a "name" like "Elena
| Kuznetsov" would simply be a grammatical error and never occur
| as a real name.
|
| However, now people from abroad visit the country or possibly
| even (re-)immigrate and suddenly you do have real-live "Elena
| Kuznetsovs" - in addition to the regular gendered names. This
| sounds pretty complicated to keep track of.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Yep. One thing I forgot to mention is that kids born to
| Americans here typically inherit the father's last name - so
| an Elena Kuznetsov is a very real possibility.
|
| In fact, that's one way to guess/cold-read some information
| about a person. If you meet an Elena Kuznetsov in America,
| odds are pretty decent that she was born to Russian parents
| here.
| watwut wrote:
| Gendered name is grammatical construct, literally. But the
| strong "Elena Kuznetsov" cant exist rules are bad idea,
| because a.) foreigners exist b.) minorities exists c.) people
| with strong opinions over how they want to be named exist.
|
| They can exist, but sound weird in the language.
| hiatus wrote:
| > people with strong opinions over how they want to be
| named exist.
|
| is a total non-issue. You can't, in any country I'm aware
| of, choose absolutely any name you want.
| Muromec wrote:
| It will not of course.
| DavidVoid wrote:
| It's already eroded in many countries right? Gendered
| patronymic names used to be common here in Sweden - Katarina
| Gustavsdotter (Vasa) was the daughter of Gusav Eriksson
| (Vasa), who was the son of Erik Johansson (Vasa), &c. - but
| gendered patronymic names eventually became permanent last
| names that got inherited over multiple generations.
|
| So now we have a few hundred thousand people with the last
| name Andersson, despite most of them not being Anders's son.
| dale_glass wrote:
| This sometimes also causes problems for the authorities
| themselves for a change.
|
| I recall some TV program long ago mentioning the police had
| trouble with Russians because sometimes they think there's a
| whole gang and it's really just one guy whose name got
| corrupted in 5 different ways.
|
| Depending on the Russian name and the local language there can
| be many ways to screw things up. Like Elena might get written
| down as Helen somewhere and Lena somewhere else. And that's
| just for viable normal names.
| Asooka wrote:
| That's a problem within the EU already, no need to travel
| across the globe. A Bulgarian family moving to Germany would
| face that exact problem. I hope we can eventually lobby the EU
| to recognise and allow gendered surnames across the Union,
| since it is part of our language and culture.
| WalterBright wrote:
| My last name was Americanized from Badenov.
| adolph wrote:
| @patio11, I realize "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About
| Names" [0] does disclaim comprehensiveness, but gendered last
| names seem a worthwhile inclusion.
|
| 0. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-
| programmers-...
| nneonneo wrote:
| Chinese people rarely change their surnames after marriage;
| kids usually inherit the father's surname and that's it. This
| has never caused any issues; systems I've interacted with have
| been totally OK with the idea that the parents can have
| different surnames from each other.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Yep, none of the women in my family have changed their name
| when the got married. Long marriages, kids, and no issues so
| far.
| cortesoft wrote:
| > who assume that married couples, and parents/children all
| have the same last name and hit roadblocks when that
| expectation does not match reality
|
| Speaking as someone whose mom didn't change their name when
| marrying my dad, with a sister who didn't change her name when
| marrying my brother in law, with a wife who also didn't change
| her name when she married me, I think this problem is
| overblown. I have yet to encounter any actual issues with this.
|
| Sometimes people will assume we aren't married and/or divorced,
| and people will often call me by my wife's last name and vice
| versa, but it has never caused any actual problem. Never had
| any system that assumes we have the same last name. So many
| people live in blended families anyway, that very few
| systems/people make these assumptions any more.
| romanhn wrote:
| Funny enough, my wife and her parents all ended up with
| different variations of their last names in English when
| immigrating: ending in -ky, -kiy, and -kaya.
| technothrasher wrote:
| > Famous people named Fenech include [...]
|
| What? No love for Paul Fenech from "Fat Pizza"?
| dustincoates wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I grew up in the US and didn't realize for quite a few years
| that most people pronounce my last name differently than my
| family does. After a while I decided that they were right, and
| just rolled with it. Our pronunciation is closer to the
| original spelling we see in old genealogy docs. I have no idea
| why they changed it. Maybe universal literacy wasn't such a
| thing back then. "What's your last name?" "Suchandsuch." "Is
| that spelled like [...]?" "Yeah, sure, I guess?"
|
| But I grew up around a lot of Polish families, and my
| classmates had the annual fun of explaining to our teachers
| that "Salchow" is pronounced like "Sargrow". I won't complain
| to much about people "mispronouncing" mine.
| palmotea wrote:
| > I grew up in the US and didn't realize for quite a few
| years that most people pronounce my last name differently
| than my family does. After a while I decided that they were
| right, and just rolled with it.
|
| I technically mispronounce my own name, and always have. Same
| thing happened, just a generation or two up.
| fguerraz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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)
| klipt wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| stockresearcher wrote:
| > The correct long term answer is that we have to have her name
| changed legally
|
| Are you sure?
|
| SSA has administrative offices that deal with data errors.
| Generally in a GSA high rise in a big city. NOT the offices
| where you go to get benefits.
|
| Someone doing data entry for the SSA fat fingered some info
| about me back when I was born, and I only found out in the
| 2010s thanks to the IRS rejecting a tax filing (I had to pay a
| 50 cent late fee!!!).
|
| Went in-person to their office in the Metcalfe Federal Building
| in Chicago and the lady spent a few minutes examining
| documents, typed on her computer for about 20 seconds, and that
| was that. All fixed.
| kstrauser wrote:
| No kidding? That'd be way better, if so. I'll check into
| that. Thanks for the suggestion!
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| 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)...
| palmotea wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| buu700 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
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