There are a frightening number of systems that don't allow "-", which isn't even an edge case. A lot of people - mostly women - hyphenate their last names on marriage, rather than throw their old name away. My wife did. She legally changed her name when she came of age, and when we met and married years later she said, "I paid for money for my name; I'm not letting it go." (Note: I wasn't pressuring her to take my name.) So she hyphenated it, and has come to regret the decision. She says she should have switched, or not, but the hyphen causes problems everywhere. It's not a legal character in a lot of systems, including some government systems.

[–] troybot@midwest.social 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (7 children)

And you'd think a simple solution is just leave out the hyphen when you put you name in, but that can also lead to problems when the system is looking for a 100% perfect match.

And good luck if they need to scan the barcode on your ID.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 9 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Then the first part is interpreted (in the US, anyway) as a middle name, not as part of the last name. I did run into a recently married woman who did that: dropped her middle name, moved her last to the middle, and used her spouse's last name.

More commonly, places that don't take hyphens tend to just run the two names together: Axel-Smith becomes AxelSmith.

Programmers can be really dumb.

[–] Malgas 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

My mom didn't hyphenate, but she does include her maiden name when writing her full name, after her middle name. It never even occurred to me that that's uncommon.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 3 points 1 week ago

So she writes 4 names? Does she put her maiden and married names both in the "surname" field? Or middle and maiden together in the "middle name" field?

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