Fuller Names: Names that do more

You’ve heard of full names but let me introduce you to even fuller names.

In Iain M. Banks‘s Culture novels, names act as an address if the person concerned stays where they were brought up [ref]. This got me thinking about the roles of names in the age of The Internet. There is a lot of pressure on parents (well some parents) to give their children unique names these days. Mostly this results in some questionable name choices. Add to that the push for a unique personal brand, chosen handles, nicknames, deadnames, and all the other naming stuff. This left me wondering if Mr Banks might not have had a good idea we can use.

For fun, I thought I would see if I could work out a structure for a naming system that could be a unique route/reference to a single person. That got me thinking of other fiction that does interesting or cool things with names and titles.

I’m going to start with a list of name things that could be used:

• Given name (or new name) [Legal Name]
• Family name (surname) [Family]
• Nickname and/or handle(s) [Handle]
• Title(s) (Mr, Mrs, Mx, Ms, Lord, HRH etc.) [Title]
• Chosen name [Known As]
• Location [Address Parts]
• Birthplace [Birthplace]
• Career or profession [Profession]
• Parents [Father] [Mother]
• Employer [Employer]
• Pronouns
• Notable activities [Activities]
• DNS/Profile [Lookup Request Service]
• Letters after name [LAN]
• Esquire (perhaps)

The basics

The first few should be relatively obvious, For example, you might refer to me as Mr Matthew David “Lord Matt” Brown. That’s the first four – all common name and title things.

Then we get to known as. I tend to go by Matt.

Address parts

Address parts are the section of naming inspired by Iain M. Banks. I suppose that the address section could have many parts the use of which could be optional because not all of us want to doxx ourselves. In this imaginary world, the full address part of the name is used for official stuff (like opening a line of credit, utility billing, voter registration, etc.

Culture names act as an address if the person concerned stays where they were brought up. Let’s take an example; Balveda, from Consider Phlebas. Her full name is Juboal-Rabaroansa Perosteck Alseyn Balveda dam T’seif. The first part tells you she was born/brought up on Rabaroan Plate, in the Juboal stellar system (where there is only one Orbital in a system, the first part of a name will often be the name of the Orbital rather than the star); Perosteck is her given name (almost invariably the choice of one’s mother), Alseyn is her chosen name (people usually choose their names in their teens, and sometimes have a succession through their lives; an alseyn is a graceful but fierce avian raptor common to many Orbitals in the region which includes the Juboal system); Balveda is her family name (usually one’s mother’s family name) and T’seif is the house/estate she was raised within. The ‘sa’ affix on the first part of her name would translate into ‘er’ in English (we might all start our names with ‘Sun-Earther’, in English, if we were to adopt the same nomenclature), and the ‘dam’ part is similar to the German ‘von’. Of course, not everyone follows this naming-system, but most do, and the Culture tries to ensure that star and Orbital names are unique, to avoid confusion.

Names, A FEW NOTES ON THE CULTURE by Iain M Banks

Using Banks’s system we would all acquire Sun-Earther as part of our location name or Sol-3 perhaps. I took inspiration from history for birthplace and differed from Banks slightly. See Birthplace for more of my ideas there. I justify differing in that (1) there is no reason not to riff on the idea and (2) “not everyone follows this naming-system” so we are still canonical if we too differ.

One fun idea might be to play with postcodes. Most countries have them. Many that have postcodes (zip codes in the US) have letters in them. For those with letters, one could substitute words for each letter.

For example, my postcode area is CT9. So I could choose to render that at Character Transcriber as a reference to both TTRPGs and my writing.

For brevity (acknowledging the irony here), it would probably be traditional to include the minimum needed lines to find you. On top of that, it might be optional just how much you include.

For example, you live at 237 Madeup Street, Somecounty, Smalltown, AB1 2CD. You might choose to render that as Madeup Smalltown A Brilliant (1/2) Cool Dude. Or you may choose to forego the address most of the time.

Birthplace

This one is a nod back to the invention of surnames. My reference here is Leonardo da Vinci whose name means Leonardo from Venice. Thus, part of your name could be “de [Birthplace]”.

Career or profession

This is another nod back to the invention of surnames. Many surnames trace their origin to professions. Names like Smith, Brown, Baker, Tailor, etc..

As a bonus this part of your fuller name answers the two most common questions, “Who are you?” and “What do you do?”.

Parents

Another early surname thing but also something nerdy and sci-fi. #

Surnames such as Johnson, Matthewson, Babson, and so forth first came about to define a person by who a parent was.

No for the sci-fi bit. In Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda, we meet the Nietzscheans who carry the names of their parents. This takes the form of [Name] from [Father] out of [Mother]. You can add that to your fuller name.

I guess you could also add professions for your parents too.

That would make mine by John the artist out of Rosemary the teacher

Employer

For Employer as part of your name, we look to Max Barry’s book Jennifer Government. In Barry’s setting people take their employer as their surname. Guess who Jennifer works for…

As we are not a dystopia, perhaps a fuller name might hyphenate the employer with the family name. For me, that would be Brown-Self (as I do not work for a company).

Esquire

Esquire is sometimes used as a general courtesy title for any man in a formal setting, with no precise significance, usually as a suffix to his name, and commonly with initials only. Chuck an “Esq.” in if you want. After your location name part seems to feel about right to me.

Pronouns

This is where I got a bit creative. Rather than list the pronouns, we can demonstrate them.

Take both [Profession] and [Kown As] (chosen name) we can make:

[she|he|they|…] [are|is|…] the [Profession] call [her|him|them|…] [Known As]

For me, this would be “he is an Author call him Matt”

Activities

This is a section where you can bulk out your name with things you do that are integral to your identity. I might choose “gamer, geek, coder, writer, chair of Thanet Creative”

DNS: Lookup Request Service

DNS stands for Domain Name Service it is what helps your computer turn authorbuzz.co.uk into a unique network address so the page can load. Perhaps you don’t want to give out your address and phone number but you might want to enable people to request those details. Your Lookup Request Service is where people can go for more information. Like, for example, your online profile. Like my about me address https://me.lordmatt.co.uk/.

Letters after name

We already have a system of letters after names like BSc, PhD, MD, DLitt etc.. They are called Post-Nominal Letters if you were wondering. They still go at the end.

The Oxford University Calendar style guide lists diplomas and certificates after degrees so I’m claiming HNDip [ref].

Putting the fuller name all together.

We are left with a pattern for fuller names that looks like this:

[Title] [Legal Name] [Handle[ AKA [Handle]…]] [Family]-[Employer] da [Birthplace] by [Father] out of [Mother]; [|she|he|they|…] [|are|is|…] the [Profession] [called|call [her|him|them|…]] [Known As] the [Activities] in [Address Parts] referencing [Lookup Request Service] [LAN]

For me, I am unfussed about my pronouns which can easily be inferred so I skipped some of the pronoun formations for better “flow”. For the same reason, I added a semi-colon after parents to disambiguate transitions.

I am the one and only Mr. Matthew David “Lord Matt” Brown-Self da Ramsgate Esq. by John the Artist out of Rosemary the Teacher; the Author called Matt the gamer, geek, coder, writer, and chair of Thanet Creative in Sol-3 Kent Character Transcriber 9 referencing me.lordmatt.co.uk HNDip

What’s your fuller name?