Sigurd Felix Wolfgang Atreides - I literally laughed my ass of. “SFWA, don’t touch that”. Once I heard a mom calling her little “Riddick”, I couldn’t control myself either. My daughter had a little chubby in her class, his name was “Maxxx”, yeah, with three “x”. (Wasn’t there a comic or something called that way back??) I maybe shouldn’t laugh so loud, our daughters second name is “Galadriel”. But our names were so boring.
You’re right, I forgor Nazis defining trait is their stupidity. For me being proud of germanic/ Scandinavian stuff (Wolfgang/ Sigurd) would exclude being proud of Roman stuff. Because defying and defeating Rome is an important pillar of the German national mythos.
((Just in defence of the names Wolfgang and Sigurd, they are perfectly normal names when worn by a normal person))
I’ve always felt like the names we pick for ourselves ought to be more valid than the ones others choose for us. We should choose names for ourselves at different stages of life, and just tack them on in whatever order we like. You want something more fun than mummy and daddy gave you? Knock yourself out. Were your idiot parents drunk when they signed the papers? Well you can fix that at 12 if you like. We are who we choose to be and this the goddamn future.
Honestly, I think it would be fun to choose new names at various stages of life, adding them on as we age. If our parents aren’t going to take naming us seriously, why should we? So what if we have a dozen names we no longer use? It becomes a summary of who we were, how we came to be ourselves, a reminder of growing up.
I wholly agree with your initial sentiment, although I envision it being structured differently. I think it makes sense for a person to have a name when they are growing, especially one given to you by your parents since they are (typically) a huge part of who you are at that point in your life.
But, no one stays who they are when they were 7, or 12, or 16. By the time they’re not a minor I would argue that they’re hardly the same person. Thus, I think it should be expected and tradition for people to change their name once they truly become individuals.
And I think it doesn’t even have to be a legal thing. Parents can just be like, “think about and pick your new name” and once the person decides, they (and everyone else they inform) just starts calling them that name.
I agree that there should be no need to make a legal name change. Likewise, it’s nobody’s business how many middle names we build up over our lives. If one of them is “Superman” from when we were six, nobody needs to know.
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