That's not my name. My name is...

[addedentry]

Owen McKnight. Except for a stage whisper of "Is that legal?" when the registrar announced us, no one has expressed that much surprise at my taking j4's name. A chap might almost be disappointed!

I'm Owen Massey McKnight in full. Instead of a double surname as rmc28 chose, I've made my old surname my new middle name. The idea was to keep my professional

Comments

[jiggery_pokery]

Something else seems to be missing though, Graham.

Neither Meg nor I am particularly attached to our surnames. We sometimes joke about becoming Meg and Chris Penguin. (We've been called Meg and Chris Pokery in the past, which is a bit patriarchal; I have yet to walk on roses. But wouldn't hewalksonroses be a great username? Hmmm...)

Edited: I am old enough that I ought not to get the grammar of neither and nor wrong, but apparently not. Twice.

[addedentry]

It takes an old friend to notice the sleight of hand in the middle (-: Two birds with one stone!

Surely Mr & Mrs Duck?

[jiggery_pokery]

Y'know, I had this suspicion I owed you a great big apology, so surely I still do. It can't be polite to remind a friend of a name that they liked so little that they got rid of it, even in white, so I apologise for my rudeness.

Meg surprised me, the other day, by saying that she thought she liked the rhythm of "Megan Pokery" - the whole trochee dactyl thing.

[addedentry]

Don't be silly - I stood up and said it loud! I didn't want to move forward without accepting who I was and had been.

[hoshuteki]

I have not kept the surname I was born with in any form (my current surname used to be my middle name), but I do have a deed poll at home. However, that was done about five years after I actually changed my name, so I you must be right about the 'if you say it, it is so' aspect to such name changes.

[addedentry]

The deed poll is a spell: the words alone make it so, like a promise, or an oath, or indeed a marriage.

[vinaigrettegirl]

No, the wedding is a spell.

The marriage is a continuous act. Plate-spinning on a unicycle or a tandem whilst juggling whilst whipping tablecloths off tables, interrupted by the odd nap, falling off, reading books, and finding the unicycle has morphed into a tandem, or the other way around, again.

[sphyg]

You're the second person I know who changed to their new wife's surname. I decide that I'd rather change my name once rather than have to explain myself over and over. Though I still have to spell this one out for people.

[lnr]

Technically you really do just need to say "this is my name" and it is so. The deed poll just makes it easier for you to prove that you're still the same person you were before and you're serious about this name - it makes convincing banks and so on easier to do. And given it doesn't cost anything it's probably worth it :)

Janet had told me over Christmas, which is why I wasn't surprised at the time, I still think it's a lovely idea. I'm still not sure what I'll do with my name when I marry!

[qatsi]

I tried my best with the banks but they didn't want to know about my change of status so long as I wasn't changing my name (despite the fact that I'm sure they'll have asked for it when I applied for accounts).

[addedentry]

That's interesting. It ties in with my suspicion that banks don't know exactly why they want to collect certain pieces of information.