What Would Your Surname Be?

(~2 minutes to read)

I’m thinking of changing my last name (aka surname).

How do “Kelvin Humorist”, “Kelvin Bigrock”, “Kelvin Bignose” or “Kelvin Barking” sound?

Many surnames in many countries originate from a person’s occupation (Cooper, Fletcher, Potter) or some land feature or building near where they lived (Brooks, Church, Green), some aspect of their physical appearance (Short, Brown), or where they were originally from. So all the names on my shortlist are in keeping with surname tradition, even if “Humorist” doesn’t sound like a real surname—but no doubt “Fuller”, “Archer” and “Clark” (Clerk) sounded odd when they were first used.

Today, people might have names such as Rudi Programmer, David Recyclingdepot, Emily Facelift, or George Moosejaw.

Naming people after something they live near might be problematic these days though, given population densities—many people would share the same surname and therefore be mistakenly identified as related to each other. In Hollywood, the same difficulty might occur for “Facelift”.

I wonder how Flashman’s family (from Tom Brown’s Schooldays) acquired its name.

And I used to wonder about the Star Wars character, Chewbacca. I’d grown up believing that his name was “Wookie Chewbacca” and that “Chewbacca” was his last name. It followed therefore that his name referred to his ancestors’ (nasty) habit of chewing tobacco. Turns out that he is a member of the Wookiee species and that “Chewbacca” is his only name. According to Wikipedia, the name is a corruption of the Russian word собака (sobaka), meaning “dog”.

You live and learn.

But let’s now throw another thought into the mix. Pretentious names for mundane jobs—a phenomenon that presumably grew out of the need to make the holders of such jobs feel more valued.

Clerks are now Office Administrators. School dinner ladies (aka cooks—or at least they were in my time) are now “Education Centre Nourishment Consultants”. And bartenders are now mixologists or “Beverage Dissemination Officers”. (I’m not making these up—my sources might be, but I’m not!)

Picture a latter-day Captain Cook sailing his ship around the world. When asked his name, he replies, “Captain James Educationcentrenourishmentconsultant at your service.”

Or imagine former Canadian Prime Minister Joe Clark with a name like “Joseph Officeadministrator”.

Could you order a beer with a straight face knowing what the bartender’s last name is?

Finally, let’s throw another name trend into the soup.

For a while now, the tendency to select obscure or made-up first names or use alternative spellings for “normal” names has been blowing the minds of registrars, teachers and others whose job entails the writing down of people’s names. If you combine this phenomenon with a desire (or government mandate) to re-align last names with occupations or physical characteristics or whatever, we could end up with people named “Phantasia Colourdistributiontechnician” (Painter) or “Cosette Retailjedi” (Shop assistant).

What would your last name become if for some reason, governments mandated that we change our names to reflect our occupation?