Re: OT: Anthroponymics

On the subject of customary forms of address, I would just like to point out
that while address by given name is the "norm" in the US, in actual practice
it varies quite a bit from individual to individual. I know a gentleman
whose first name is "John" and middle name is "David"; he goes by "J. D.". I
met him in college, and through him also met one James Cochrane, who went
exclusively by "Cochrane". Nobody called him "James" at the time. (He goes
by "James" more commonly now that he's a grown man, husband, and father...
but he has never been a "Jim" or "Jimmy".) My rooomate at the time had first
name Shannon, middle name Keith, and went by "Keith", and was listed as "S.
Keith" on official documents wherever he could get away with it. That
includes the telephone directory, and he frequently got calls for a
different "S. Keith" of the same last name in our city - a reporter for the
local newspaper. Even further removed from the supposed custom was our
professor William Augustus Baird, who went by "gus" - and insisted upon the
lowercase |g| in written form. But at that point you have entered the realm
of nicknames, which may or may not bear any relationship to someone's real
name at all.

Most databases with information about people nowadays have a field in the
record for "preferred name" to capture these peculiarities.

I find the common European practice of restricting the set of names you can
give your child utterly ridiculous. Many cultures find the idea of giving
their child a reused name abhorrent; aside from not moving to those
countries, they would seem to be out of luck. Of course, if the US did have
such a system, Nicholas Cage would have been prevented from naming his child
Kal-El, and Chipper Jones from naming his child after a baseball stadium,
but you can't let a few good outcomes bias you toward laws that restrict
freedom. It's not the American Way. :)