TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/041789/04178900.060

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 4KB | 70 lines

BEHAVIOR, Page 78

It Hyphened One Night

In surnames, the distinctive mark can wreak havoc


    Jones. What a wonderful surname. Clear. One syllable. Perfectly
pronounceable. No hyphen.

    The Sammataro-Hutchinses would love to keep up with the
Joneses. "Forms aren't long enough to accommodate my whole name,"
says Debra Sammataro-Hutchins, who owns a children's clothing store
in Melrose, Mass. Says her husband Robert: "My credit cards have
me as Sammataro Hut. When I try to sign a check, I run out of
room." The family's insurance reimbursements are bogged down
because records do not match. The couple have to maintain an extra
listing in the phone book so their children's friends can find them
under Hutchins. "Ten years ago, when I married, I felt very
strongly that I should retain my name," says Debra, nee Sammataro.
"But it's been a nuisance ever since."

    At 17 letters plus a hyphen, Sammataro-Hutchins is a bit much.
Still, time has not been kind either to the Floyd-Bells,
Church-Smiths and other conscientiously nonsexist, nonconformist
couples who embraced hyphenation in the '70s as a banner of
equality. The ubiquitous computer, for example, often seems
incapable of recognizing hyphens. Says a Citibank spokesman: "This
is not an insidious attack on our part. It's a program problem."
Bureaucracies would rather set aside the mark altogether. In
Bayside, N.Y., Dana Wissner-Levy, a graduate student at Hofstra
University, had to take her battle to the school president before
the registrar's office agreed to accept her hyphen.

    Some psychologists worry about the ill effects of such
nonconformity. Says family psychologist Alan D. Entin: "Kids get
teased a lot when they have to explain the peculiarities of their
family. The problem is that a kid knows when he or she is weird."
Would the children of a marriage between, say, Jeremiah
Shostak-Fielding and Maribel Johnson-Drexler ever learn to spell
their full surname, provided that their parents could ever agree
on just what it should be? And would that alliance completely
unhinge data banks at the IRS?

    Aesthetics often dictates against hyphenation. Says a
Washington lawyer representing small businesses who was born Joel
Rothstein and is married to a woman named Wolfson:
"Rothstein-Wolfson is four syllables and 16 letters. Names get
massacred enough. Wolfson becomes Wilson. Rothstein becomes
Rothson. You can imagine what people would have done with the two
together." But could they come up with a workable union of surnames
without resorting to hyphens? "It was important for our kid's last
name to be the same as ours," says the lawyer. "Otherwise, one
parent gets left out." The solution: Rothstein gave up his last
name and took his wife's. Joel is now a Wolfson, just like his wife
and their child.

    Ideologically correct couples have ways of working things out.
When Skye Kerr married Deane Rynerson, they manufactured a new
name: Rykerson. Some couples give the father's surname to daughters
and the mother's surname to sons. For their firstborn, Pierce
Barker and Carol Frost of Friendship, Md., did not bother with
family at all, nor were they intimidated by the perils of
hyphenating. They gave the child the surname Roth-Tubman, after the
author Philip Roth and the 19th century abolitionist Harriet
Tubman. Similarly, in Newton, Mass., Harry Finkelstein and Jamie
Kelem junked their surnames and became the Keshets, from the Hebrew
for rainbow.

    In any case, the Sammataro-Hutchinses have had it. They left
the bar out on their youngest child's birth certificate. Even so,
their eldest son Tynan, 8, wears the name with pride. "I'm the only
one in class who has a hyphen." Perverse, perhaps, but some of us
like it that way.