TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/041789/04178900.060

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 3.8 KB | 78 lines

                                                                                BEHAVIOR, Page 78

It Hyphened One Night


In surnames, the distinctive mark can wreak havoc


    Jones. What a wonderful surname. Clear. One syllable.
Perfectly pronounceable. No hyphen.

    The Sammataro-Hutchinses would love to keep up with the
Joneses. "Forms aren't long enough to accommodate my whole
name," says Debra Sammataro-Hutchins, who owns a children's
clothing store in Melrose, Mass. Says her husband Robert: "My
credit cards have me as Sammataro Hut. When I try to sign a
check, I run out of room." The family's insurance
reimbursements are bogged down because records do not match. The
couple have to maintain an extra listing in the phone book so
their children's friends can find them under Hutchins. "Ten
years ago, when I married, I felt very strongly that I should
retain my name," says Debra, nee Sammataro. "But it's been a
nuisance ever since."

    At 17 letters plus a hyphen, Sammataro-Hutchins is a bit
much. Still, time has not been kind either to the Floyd-Bells,
Church-Smiths and other conscientiously nonsexist, nonconformist
couples who embraced hyphenation in the '70s as a banner of
equality. The ubiquitous computer, for example, often seems
incapable of recognizing hyphens. Says a Citibank spokesman:
"This is not an insidious attack on our part. It's a program
problem." Bureaucracies would rather set aside the mark
altogether. In Bayside, N.Y., Dana Wissner-Levy, a graduate
student at Hofstra University, had to take her battle to the
school president before the registrar's office agreed to accept
her hyphen.

    Some psychologists worry about the ill effects of such
nonconformity. Says family psychologist Alan D. Entin: "Kids get
teased a lot when they have to explain the peculiarities of
their family. The problem is that a kid knows when he or she is
weird." Would the children of a marriage between, say, Jeremiah
Shostak-Fielding and Maribel Johnson-Drexler ever learn to spell
their full surname, provided that their parents could ever agree
on just what it should be? And would that alliance completely
unhinge data banks at the IRS?

    Aesthetics often dictates against hyphenation. Says a
Washington lawyer representing small businesses who was born
Joel Rothstein and is married to a woman named Wolfson:
"Rothstein-Wolfson is four syllables and 16 letters. Names get
massacred enough. Wolfson becomes Wilson. Rothstein becomes
Rothson. You can imagine what people would have done with the
two together." But could they come up with a workable union of
surnames without resorting to hyphens? "It was important for
our kid's last name to be the same as ours," says the lawyer.
"Otherwise, one parent gets left out." The solution: Rothstein
gave up his last name and took his wife's. Joel is now a
Wolfson, just like his wife and their child.

    Ideologically correct couples have ways of working things
out. When Skye Kerr married Deane Rynerson, they manufactured a
new name: Rykerson. Some couples give the father's surname to
daughters and the mother's surname to sons. For their
firstborn, Pierce Barker and Carol Frost of Friendship, Md., did
not bother with family at all, nor were they intimidated by the
perils of hyphenating. They gave the child the surname
Roth-Tubman, after the author Philip Roth and the 19th century
abolitionist Harriet Tubman. Similarly, in Newton, Mass., Harry
Finkelstein and Jamie Kelem junked their surnames and became the
Keshets, from the Hebrew for rainbow.

    In any case, the Sammataro-Hutchinses have had it. They left
the bar out on their youngest child's birth certificate. Even
so, their eldest son Tynan, 8, wears the name with pride. "I'm
the only one in class who has a hyphen." Perverse, perhaps, but
some of us like it that way.