Whats In A Last Name

"By the power vested in me by the state of jibberish, I pronounce you husband and wife" -- The man every married person learns to curse if things go sour

When your younger, your decision making really isn't your own. Your parents give you everything you need and decide what you shouldn't get eventhough you might truly need it. They look over your shoulder at every step ensuring that you get the things they never got and in addition to this wonderful responsibility, they also manage their hectic lives. However, talking about pressure and responsibility is not the point of this post. The one element of the over-fantasized concept of marriage that I want to talk about is the last name a woman gets when she marries the man/woman of her dreams. I wonder where it is written in stone that a woman needs to adopt a man's last name? I think I missed the memo on where that Holy Grail lies.

The best solution for this problem is to do one of two things

1. Amalgamate the last names
2. Concatenate the last names

Now, lets take each of these and see the pros and cons.

Amalgamation

Althought the process sounds like a super villain out of an Uncanny X-Men comic book, the reality is far from it. Lets take an example to illustrate the phoenetic problem some cultures will have if this goes live.

Eg. John Brown marries Mary Shelly - Their last name becomes Brolly. Sounds a bit mannly but its the concept working as designed.

Now, what kind of good samaritans would we be if we only helped people with western family names? The bad kind. So lets take a quick trip over to the Indian subcontinent for some more Sesame Street fun.

Indian Eg. Ram Chandran marries Prachi Jain. They gets the last name Chanchi. Still not so bad but with the kind of world we live in, its only a matter of time before we deal with intercultural marriages.

IntCul Eg. Melroy Coelho marries Danielle Huntchekova. So we get the last name Coechekova. I am sure my dad and mom would have a fit calling the kids and so would their friends as well but its something that can be worked around.

Along with the problem of last name amalgamation there is another problem which requires time to be injected into the equation. What happens when the kids of last-name-amalgamated-parents (LNAP) get married? Lets find out.

LNAP Kids getting married - Brolly married Chanchi - Brochi.

So amalgamation works out pretty fine and everyone is none the wiser. Lets take care of the next solution which actually sounds more pleasant but causes much more problems.

Concatenation

I know it sounds like a yank-infected chinese cooking style but its actually a method of putting two things together by keeping their original states the same. So in the first example, the last name would become Brown-Shelly and so on. Now, these parents become LNCP - Last Name Concatenated Parents. Everything else holds the same except for the children who get completely screwed and every subsequent generation suffers even more.

eg. Brown-Shelly meets Chandran-Jain and now you have Brown-Shelly-Chandran-Jain and the next batch of kids suffer even more.

Therefore, to avoid all this confusion women should take mens last names. Why? Look at the amount of confusion we had to go through to come to a peaceful amicable solution. Oh and for all you feminists screaming for women's equality and why men can't just take women's last names? When you get the concept of equality right we will talk business. When and if I feel like bashing that concept I will get to it. Melroy Coelho - Out.

Music Listent to while writing this blog - Alice In Chains - I Stay Away

Mood - Happy