The Modern Problem with Names

So there's a subject that I've been thinking about for a few years that I thought might interest a few people so I thought I'd post my mental ramblings here for the world (or more accurately the 50 or so people who read my blog) to see.

So the issue I've been thinking on is names, more specifically second names or surnames. Your second name shows the lineage of your family, or at least it does if you're a man, if you're a women you're 'supposed' to give up your maiden name when you get married. Apart from being grossly unfair on the 50% or so of the population born with female genitalia this also leaves the issue that family lines with even a single generation of all female children will instantly be broken.

Of course in our modern age not many women still elect to take their husband's name, a few do obviously but it's a lot more commonplace to find a husband and wife with different second names. While this solution is perfect for the husband and wife in a relationship it does somewhat make the second name of the children somewhat more difficult to deal with.

Most families tend to remedy this by double barrelling their child's name e.g. 'Wallace-Smith' or 'Williams-Burrow' which might seem like a fine solution. However the unforeseen problem here is that in a few generations of double barrelling our children's names will take around 4 days to say and will consist of about 50 second names as opposed to the single name that we are used to.

So is there a workable solution? where both sides of the marital divide are represented ? Where we don't end up having to omit 90% of our friend's name for fear of being trapped in a name loop? Well there is a solution that I've thought of that might not make people happy, but is at least a workable solution to he double barrelled problem.

My idea was to take the first half of one name and the second half of the other to form a new name based on the old one. Examples of this would be 'Wallith' (Wallace + Smith) or 'Willrow' (Williams-Burrow) and as you can see it is usually possible to fit the names together without too much difficulty.

Of course some may complain that this doesn't preserve lineage because the names change with every generation of the family, but I always feel like it's more important to preserve the feeling of the current family (i.e. the mother father and children) then it is to preserve the memory of a family history. If you want to keep your bloodline in memory forever then you can use the internet, or try killing a lot of people they'll probably remember your family name then.