American Names

No, I don't mean names like Randy, Larry, Grover or all those misspelt Stevens. I mean "How do names work in America?" It seems a silly question as their names would seem to work the same way as ours - they don't have patronymics or surnames first - but by talking to Americans I've come to realise that they think about names differently.

The most common custom, which most people would have noticed:

• Rather than Hillary Clinton née Rodham, Americans prefer Hillary Rodham Clinton

I had assumed that this was a double-barrel surname without a hyphen. But I recently discovered that this is not always the way. Apparently many married women move their maiden name into the middle name field on forms. That's good to know. If that's the case, I guess that means I should put books by Mary Boas Hall next to her husband Rupert Hall in my bibliography. (But where does that leave things she wrote before she was married?) Still, I'm not certain that that's always the case.

Hearing that a friend of mine had two friends have done just that with her name, I started wondering how they can just shift a surname into a given name field. Apparently the distinction is less clear here. I think it might stem from the fact that use of the mother's maiden name as a middle name is more common here. But here's the strange thing, they both gave up their existing middle names in order to make room for her maiden name in the middle name box. I asked why she didn't just keep both but she didn't really understand because:

• Americans don't have given names, they have first name and middle name (and ne'er the twain shall meet)

When I mentioned the given names box on forms, they said they had never seen that. I think most of them have heard of multiple given names but don't really understand it. (Not that I love the idea either; it strikes me as a bit of an affectation but the concept is not foreign to me.)

I think that this is partly the cause of another phenomenon that I noticed early on:

• Americans are rarely interested in the whole middle name but they do want to know your middle initial

It seems a little strange that they don't care about the letters that come after. But this leads to another phenomenon peculiarly American:

• Some Americans have no middle name, just a middle initial

The most famous example being Harry S. Truman; Herman B Wells is another. (This leads to all sorts of debates about whether to use a full stop, as there's nothing to abbreviate. Truman usually added one so the punctuation is considered part of his name.)

Oh, oh and I must say something about ordinals. It's not just Jr and Sr! We've all heard of these Americans with "comma Jr" because they're named after their father. (I don't think I've ever met an Australian who used "Junior" in such a formal way, just one who used it as a nickname. It always seemed to me that most Australians named after their fathers use their middle name, which some Americans do too.) But here's the real difference:

• Junior and Senior can be part of your legal name (will appear on government-issued ID)
• They also use Roman numerals. You can be John Thomas Smith IV in America.

That last one always makes me laugh. "Where are you king of? Or are you a pope?" I'm not sure why they feel the need to give the exact same name or keep a track of how many there have been but forms allow for it so Americans take advantage of the opportunity. (H.L. Mencken already remarked on this but apparently the practice was just starting when he was writing in the '20s.)