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From: mmk@brunix.UUCP (Matthew Kaplan)
Newsgroups: net.women,net.kids
Subject: Re: What's in a name?
Message-ID: <6492@brunix.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 9-Feb-84 09:45:47 EST
Article-I.D.: brunix.6492
Posted: Thu Feb  9 09:45:47 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 14-Feb-84 01:03:35 EST
References: yeti.142, <6816@watmath.UUCP>
Lines: 21

There's a much simpler solution.  Simply restrict yourself to having
children only with people who share your last name.  The trivial way
to accomplish this is to form surname "clubs", that have regular meetings
which provide their members with an pool of appropriate spouses (spice?)/
mates.  In large cities this would be quite satisfactory.

However, many might consider this solution a bit restrictive.
A better solution would be for a couple to change their names to a neutral
one (say, Jones) before bearing children.  This solution has the advantage
that, if everybody changes their names to the same thing (say, Jones)
then in a generation (more likely two, because there is always a group
of people who do their best to hold back social progress on all fronts,
and will, therefore, refuse to change their names) everybody will be
called the same thing (say, Jones) and the whole name changing business
can go away.

Still another solution is to have a correspondence between one's name
and phone number.  This might be preferred by some, because the whole
family gets a new name when it moves (unless to prefers to keep its
previous phone number) so people who don't like their name don't have
to feel they're stuck with it forever.