By using “Mrs. Rick Caucus”, it labels Mr. Rick Caucus’ status as married….there would be no Mrs. if he wasn’t. It compares to the Miss label. This is actually quite clever.
I don’t get why he could possibly think people don’t use “Ms.” still. What else would we call women? “Hey, You”?
>>”it labels Mr. Rick Caucus’ status as married….there would be no Mrs. ”
There’d be no Mr. Rick Caucus either. His last name is Redfern. I think the idea is that the letter is for him– the spouse of the Ms. Caucus. Caucus is her name; not his.
When I was in junior high school and “Ms.” came around, I thought of it as a godsend: I could never remember which of my female teachers were “Miss” and which were “Mrs.” even by year’s end. It always came out of my mouth sounding kind of like “Ms” anyway.
(hell, maybe I inspired it)
And now, suddenly, I never had to worry about that again.
One of the questions that women are asked… but not men… is whether or not they plan to change their name when they get married. It’s a bit of a bother, with much paperwork involved. When Ms. Jane Doe becomes Mrs. Jane Roe her identity changes (to the outside world). Some people, coincidentally nearly all women, think this is a big deal.
The extreme version of this is the (largely archaic) form wherein Ms. Jane Doe becomes Mrs. Richard Roe, ceding almost her entire former identity, becoming a foreign growth upon her new husband’s identity.
I’m a dude, so I didn’t have these sorts of things to worry about when I got married. It wasn’t a big deal, then… to me. I’m sympathetic enough to assume that it might have been different to the woman I married, but burned by the divorce to not care how it affected the woman I divorced. (The advice I give my daughter on how to achieve a successful marriage is “don’t marry a crazy woman”.)
Joanie is right… the title of address for men doesn’t care if he is married, thus suggesting that there is equal validity to either status. Not so for women, who have different titles of address for their married and unmarried states, suggesting that one of these states is worthy of note, if not both, in assessing a woman’s worth.
The fact that there exist people who would use the archaic form of address, in which a woman exists solely as an aspect of her husband, is worthy of a shudder. (although, admittedly, this is so because there ALSO exist women who tolerate, even perpetuate, this form of address.)
I still think the letter is addressed to Joanie. The writer assumes she took his name. No shudder for Rick. 😂
chipchristian – the fact that people are still using that form of address for women should have caused him a shudder.
James Pollock – It’s not just as a man that you weren’t asked. It’s as a man who got married long enough ago. (I got a much more polite version of the question once, but because I *had* assumed my husband’s name, and was having trouble remembering it, “what’s your name now?” came across as a pop quiz, and I answered badly.)
Here’s a thought. Address the person by name. There is no need for “Mr.”, “Ms” or whatever if you’re an adult.
This looks like a current/recent strip… how could Rick not be aware “Ms.” is still used? It’s been close to universal in most business settings for twenty years, no?
As a health care worker in the back-country South I found the “Miz” title more than acceptable – see Walt Kelly’s use with Miz Hepzibah. I decry young colleagues’ use of first names to address patients, sending shudders as above. If you put Miz with the first name, well, that goes down easier. Cold calls or importuning letters addressing me by first name likely get a quick deep six.
Mark, nearly all written communication still uses a title of some sort. For in person conversations, just a first name is fine. However with kids, there are different standards. Kids are expected to NOT use an adult’s first name. When I was growing up, we were expected to call our friends’ parents by Mr. or Mrs. LastName. However, with my kids (and approval from the affected neighbors), my kids called them Mr. or Miss (Miz) FirstName. But that was in Florida. Now that we are in Illinois, the trend here seems to be back to Mrs. LastName. What I always find funny is when kids in the classroom don’t know our last name and so greet me as “ChildName’s Mom”. It does make me feel a bit odd, like that’s my only role in life, when of course, it isn’t.
With what zookeeper said about calls, the best thing about wanting callers to use your last name is if yours is hard to pronounce. My maiden name was, and it made it very easy to tell friends from junk callers before we had caller ID.
The other way to look at name change at marriage is as a free opportunity to do so (well, not “free” in time, but “free” in terms of stigma etc.: if you walk into your bank tomorrow as a single woman and say “I’m changing my last name from X to Y”, they’re likely to make it harder than if you say “I just got married and my new last name is Y”).
I know a few couples where both have changed last name: man named AB marries woman named XY, both change last name to AY or XB or some other combination.
” For in person conversations, just a first name is fine.”
Except where it isn’t, of course. Imagine Captain Kirk (or Ensign Redshirt) addressing Mr. Spock by his first name…
There’s no real reason, other than a historical tradition of matching up a woman to the most significant male person in her life because for her, marriage is the only way to achieve any social status at all, why the marriage of Ms. Jane Doe and Mr. Richard Roe can’t leave two people afterwards named Mr. Richard Roe and Ms. Jane Doe.
Hollywood is leading us there, and not just because Hollywood marriages tend towards the brief side, and not just because people pick stage names, either. Screen-acting is also one of the few fields where a woman can have a significant interest in her own name, which is more valuable than her interest in his. Lucille Ball spent considerable time and effort making people know who Lucille Ball was. Lucille Arnaz, on the other hand, would have been a stranger with no screen credits. So “Lucille Ball” stayed “Lucille Ball”, even though everyone knew she and Desi were married. And she stayed “Lucille Ball” when they weren’t married any more, as well. Elizabeth Taylor was well-known for having several marriages. As Elizabeth Taylor. Zsa-Zsa Gabor, had the same dynamic, to a lesser extent (and a substantially lesser acting career.)
At the other end, Courtney Cox became Courtney Cox Arquette, and it was funny enough that all the other cast members added “Arquette” to their names in the credits for one episode, when her name was changed in the credits.
Spock’s first name was never spoken on-screen, but was referred to in one episode as “unpronounceable.” Semi-canon novels have it as “S’chn T’gai” and some non-canon fan fiction has “Xtmprsqzntwlfd.” The actress who played Spock’s mother said it was “Harold.” The more you know.
Here’s how it worked years ago. Susan Smith would have been “Miss Smith” her whole life as long as she never married. If she married John Jones she would then become “Mrs. John Jones” and if he died only then would she be addressed as “Mrs. Susan Jones”. Here Joanie doesn’t like the way society 1) categorizes women by marital status as if that is the most important aspect of who women are, and 2) identifies women not as who they are themselves, but only who they are in relation to a man.
wwozy, the letter can’t be for Rick because it is addressed to “Mrs.” I think the shudder is about the assumption that he took her name, not vice versa as was common practice.
My daughter and her husband got around this problem by inventing a new last name and both taking it.
Sorry, woozy.
Ah, now Miz Ma’m’selle Hepzibah, there was a lady!
What bugs me is being referred to as “Mr. (first name)” when I’m dealing with people, usually business transactions over the phone with representatives who obviously aren’t in the US.
When my wife and I got married in the late 70s, we put a lot of thought into this.
Just kidding. About a month before the wedding I said “You going to keep your maiden name?” and she said “I don’t know, I guess maybe I’ll change it.” This is the sort of brilliant advance planning that resulted in us flying to Europe a day after the wedding (and then back again a week later) with her passport showing her old name and her tickets showing her new name. Can you imagine that happening today and nobody noticing? We’d probably both be sent to Gitmo.
My recollection from older etiquette guides was that a married woman whose husband died would still be “Mrs. John Jones”. She would only be properly addressed as “Mrs. Susan Jones” if they divorced. But most of that sort of thing has gone away or become situational.
As an aside, as I recall etiquette expert “Miss Manners” was an early and enthusiastic supporter of “Ms.”.
re “I know a few couples where both have changed last name: man named AB marries woman named XY, both change last name to AY or XB or some other combination.”
Me too. Also know one couple where he just took her last name — his was Arabic, hers Germanic, and I imaginehe assumed (probably correctly) he’d fit in more easily in the U.S. with the latter.
And a friend of a friend took name of husband when they married and kept it after divorce, rather than going back to her original name, which had been “Ramsbottom.” Sounded reasonable to me. (And yes, she was Australian. . . )
The current Mrs. Shrug prefers a form of her first name which is far more often encountered for men than for women, and her last name and my own middle and last names are all commonly spelled two or three different ways (including by relatives), so we have lots of ways for unwanted mail come-on artists to get things wrong, along with telephone spammers who get me and assume they are speaking to “Mr.” [wife’s last name].
BBBB, there is always the possibility that the person doing that is from a far east nation, where the last name is printed first. They may not know we do it differently here, and are trying to be respectful, but missing the mark. I’m sure they get the same issue by ignorant westerners who assume the last name written is the family name. Or it could just be junk callers thinking they can get on your good side by being overly familiar, as zookeeper mentioned.
@ CaroZ – Doonesbury is in reruns for weekday strips, but Sundays are new material. This one is from 17-Sep-2017.
“The current Mrs. Shrug. . .”
I hope that’s not how you introduce her in person!
“I hope that’s not how you introduce her in person!”
My primary offspring unit has kind of gotten used to being introduced that way. I think the one with a valid complaint would be the backup unit. But I don’t have one… all my eggs are in the one basket, so to speak.
James, it might be a bit of bother, but my wife took good advantage of it. Years earlier, she had ditched the use of her first name and started using her middle name. Then she got married, took his name, then got divorced and found herself with some contacts using her maiden surname and some using the now-ex’s surname. So when we got married, she used the situation to simplify things, declaring herself Her-middle-name My-surname. That’s it, just two words, including my four-letter surname. First name gone, both prior surnames gone.
Dyfsunctional, I have a feeling they quietly dropped the “unpronounceable name” thing: by the time we met Sarek and the rest of the crew, Vulcans were routinely referring to one another by their simple names.
Boise Ed, I am oddly reminded of the Grandfather’s Axe paradox.
For what it’s worth, I know several men who changed their names upon marriage.
a) step-brother-in-law changed his name to match his wife’s family. He didn’t really love his own name, nor was he close to his family.
b) a friend of my husband’s was also not quite close to his family, so he and his wife both changed their names to a conglomeration (not a hyphenation) of both names. Think “smith” and “jones” becoming “smines” rather than “smith-jones.” They’re both quite happy with their new name, and passed it on to their daughter.
c) my dad’s “dad” was really his step-dad. Although he grew up using his step-dad’s name, he was never formally adopted. When he was old enough to get a job, he needed to get a social security card (back then you didn’t get a number until you went to work) and asked his mom for his birth certificate, at which point he learned that his name wasn’t what he thought it was. He went on using the “wrong” name until he married my mother several years later, at which point they both switched to the right name. This confused my mom’s friends: “wait, you’re BOTH changing your name?”
My dad’s first name is Guy. It’s pronounced “guy” as in “that guy over there who likes coffee.” We used to be quite able to determine it was a telemarketer phoning if they used the French pronunciation and called him “Gee.” (And then attempted to French-ify our non-French last name.
Tree, I once had a couple of friends who chose a completely new surname, unrelated to either of their old ones. Someday, that’s going to drive some genealogist nuts.
Bill, I see a big distinction between changing a name and changing the object (axe) itself.
Boise Ed, I did say “oddly reminded.”
A friend of mine with surname Jones married a chap with surname Jones (they are both Welsh) – hard to know if she changed her name or not.
A colleague changed her name and passport on marriage – and then decided it was a mistake and changed it all back a year or so later (though she stayed married, and is still married 30 years on).
A friend had a similar issue as Tree’s c) example. When I met her as a teen, in the South of England in the 1970s, she had a surname, and a father and, so she thought, grandfather with the same name. But after her dad died in the 80s she found that his bio-dad had been someone else but had died in 1929 when the infant was two. Her dad had lived under his mother’s new husband’s surname all his life, but officially it was something else. The odd twist is, in 1977 I took my friend on a trip to the North of England 250 miles from where we met & lived, and we stayed in my brother’s house in Bradford (a 19thC one-up, one-down, back-to-back terraced house on a cobbled street with outdoor loo). Only 5+ years later, when her father died and the family saw their real grandfather’s name and address at the time of his marriage in 1925, did she find out this man, a grandfather she didn’t know she had, had lived five doors up from my brother’s house but 52 years before she visited. (And being a narrow terrace, I imagine that was about 120 feet away!)
Angela Merkel, German chancellor, goes by the surname of a man she was only married to for five years and divorced in 1982. She has been married to someone else for 20 years, but uses neither his name nor her birth surname.
Inspector Morse of book and then TV police fame had a mysterious first name which was finally revealed to be Endeavour. A later prequel TV series set when he was a young policeman was called Endeavour.
A friend, who is on his second marriage, refers to “the present Mrs Brown”, though I don’t think he introduces her to new people like that. Anyway, he has got away with it for 20+ years.
I went to a Quaker school. Traditionally Quakers avoided honorifics and titles and would address each other as Firstname Lastname, like William Penn and George Fox, though at school we were supposed to call the teachers Mr Thisandthat, and in a rare case (it was a boys’ school), Miss Someone. But this was pre-Ms.
re A friend of mine with surname Jones married a chap with surname Jones (they are both Welsh) – hard to know if she changed her name or not.
**************
I knew a similar couple, but they were both Andersons. (And not Welsh.)
Perhaps the most famous (at least in the U.S.) case of “impossible to tell if either changed hir name” was the marraige of Franklin Roosevelt and his distant cousin Eleanor Roosevelt.
I wonder how often, in Korea, a Kim marries a Kim.
I can’t find it again, but there was a Q&A somewhere and someone asked why some women won’t take their new husband’s last name. One reply was BECAUSE MY LAST NAME IS BEST. It was from Emily Best.
I knew two men who changed their names after marriage. These are not the exact names but similar to the names. One was a pre-med student named Edward Lash, but he went by Edward Harrison Lash, Harrison being his mother’s maiden name. He got his M.D. and married his longtime girlfriend Helen Petesky and became Edward Harrison Lash-Petesky. I thought “Lash-Petesky” sounded more like an item on a Polish restaurant’s menu than a doctor’s last name.
The other was Michael Smith (again, not the exact name but about as common a name). His second wife was Kathy Zoleray. Michael is a composer but there already is a music critic named Michael Smith, a producer named Michael Smith and an architect named Michael Smith (you can probably guess the real name). So Michael changed his name to Michael Zoleray and divorced Kathy Zoleray not long after but is still Michael Zoleray now.
CIDU Bill, Kims marry Kims all the time. I worked with a woman from China named Chen, married to a man from China named Chen. In China, women don’t change their names.
MiB, that was a rhetorical question: it’s probably a rare wedding in Korea that DOESN’T unite two Kims.
“My legal name is now Eleanor Roosevelt, but I’m going to continue to be known professionally as Eleanor Roosevelt.”
Did anybody ever explain why Joanie expected Rick to shudder?
“Did anybody ever explain why Joanie expected Rick to shudder?”
Well, I *thought* I did.
Rick doesn’t know what it’s like to have your identity tied up into someone else’s. This is because men’s names don’t change (typically) as their lives progress. Women, however, are expected to change their names just because they’ve changed marital status.
Then an item of mail comes (mis-)addressed to the name Rick would have had if he’d been expected to take on his spouse’s name in marriage. It’s incorrect, but the sender actually believed they were properly addressing someone.
I’m surprised that Rick wouldn’t know that Joanie still uses “Ms.” as her preferred title of address. They’ve been married for something like 35 years (real time; I don’t know if it’s supposed to be that long in comic strip time). And it’s certainly a convenient title to be used when writing to a woman whose marital status you don’t know and which is irrelevant under the circumstances (i.e. when writing for business purposes). From working in Washington, D.C., I would expect Rick to know lots of people who used the title “Ms.” either for themselves or when addressing others.
There was even a Doonesbury compilation book titled Dare to Be Great, Ms. Caucus, although the strip from which that title was taken predated Joanie and Rick’s marriage.
Bill: ‘I have a feeling they quietly dropped the “unpronounceable name” thing: by the time we met Sarek and the rest of the crew’
I’m actually pretty sure that the first reference to unpronounceable Vulcan names is in Sarek’s only TOS appearance, Journey to Babel.
Kirk refers to Amanda as ‘Mrs Sarek’, and she corrects him.
AMANDA: Amanda. I’m afraid you couldn’t pronounce the Vulcan name.
KIRK: Can you?
AMANDA: After a fashion, and after many years of practice. Shall we continue the tour? My husband did request it.
I’ve never been sure if she meant her Vulcan family name (given the ‘Mrs Only One Name’ reference she was correcting), or that she was given a Vulcan personal name. Either way, this doesn’t necessarily suggest that all Vulcans have unpronounceable names, just that they exist and Amanda has one.
As I recall, according to the Trek blooper reel, Spock’s first name is “Leonard”.
narmitaj’s comment reminds me: Through accident and huge hassle of getting everything reissued in a new name, my mother got stuck with the name of husband #2, whom she was married to for 9 months. Regarding other situations where title matters: Airline tickets. They ask partly so they know which gender you are. I use MRS if MS isn’t available because I am no MISS.
Mark In Boston: I read a book called Chen Village that was about life in a small rural community in China, from (roughly) the 50’s to the 90’s. Early on, the tradition was that Chen’s weren’t supposed to marry Chen’s, because they was considered incest. It was a hardship because it made it hard to find a spouse in the village, and for various reasons it was hard to find a spouse outside the village. By the end of the book, standards had been relaxed, and Chen-Chen marriage was considered acceptable.
WW: your post sounds like it has a shaggy dog story trying to emerge from it. Maybe if you add some a sho-gun and Bea families, there might be a punchline there somewhere…
“I wonder how often, in Korea, a Kim marries a Kim.”
And in various places, a “first name Kim” might marry a “last name Kim”.
I should amend what I wrote: “unpronounceable name” made its debut with that episode, but was retconned by “Amok Time,” when we met a ton of Vulcans all referring to one another by simple names.
They had the Universal Translator throughout the original series.
Even accepting the inherent illogic of a Universal Translator, it’s hard to imagine it translating proper names.
I recall one ST episode where, thanks to the universal translator, our heroes believed the alien civilization they were contacting “worshiped the sun” — only to find eventually they were some sort of neo-Christian variety who “worshiped the Son.” So apparently the universal translator liked puns (no matter how unlikely it would have happened to work out thus in an alien language), just to mess with Federation minds or something?.
(Not a translator thing, but I was also really bothered by an episode where we were told today was “Thanksgiving back on Earth.” I assume Canada lost out on the “let’s just pick one day for it, O.K.?” negotiations, and even harder cheese for all of those former Earth nations who wouldn’t have had a reason for celebrating such a holiday at all.)
Th “worship the Son” episode was best forgotten. Along with the equally-contrived nonsense with the misspelled variation of the Declaration of Independence.
Bill: In Darmok, the universal translator can’t understand anything the aliens are saying, but it can apparently still translate the proper names well enough for the crew to look them up in the ship’s computer. Which are in there despite the fact that no one has been able to communicate with these aliens before. Go figure.
Shrug: What bothered me more about that was the idea that all civilations go through a “bad phase” where they worship the sun, and a “good phase” where they worship the Son. (It would make sense if the show was written by Christian apologists, but it seemed nonsensical in the context of an otherwise atheistic show.)
In Darmok, my understanding was that the UP translated everything just fine: but without context, it was useless.
Like if a Frenchman said “C’est comme si Harry avait menti à Alice au sujet de la jambe de la reine.” The UP (or Google) will tell you it means “This is like the time Harry lied to Alice about the Queen’s leg,” which is both completely accurate and totally worthless.
(I was going to go with “Une promenade de neuf mile n’est pas une blague, surtout sous la pluie.,” but that would have been distractingly esoteric)
Unless, in this planet’s language, “son ” and “sun” were also homophones, there’s no way the UP would make this mistake.
Unless this were a stunning coincidence.
The notion that each person has one proper name and that it’s somehow indissolubly linked to their identity (so changing it affects that identity, and so that being called other things, like “Bob’s Mom” is weird) is very occidecentric.
So, a question: can anyone identify an old SF story in which someone ends up in the distant future where (among other predictable things, like inflation) there’s a custom of contextual naming? As I recall it went something like parent and offspring both calling each other “mom” because that’s unambiguous in that context. But I only vaguely remember and may be conflating multiple things…
“Unless, in this planet’s language, “son ” and “sun” were also homophones, there’s no way the UP would make this mistake.”
Well, maybe the UP didn’t make the mistake but everyone listening to the UP made the mistake.
… But honestly, I *hated* the idea for exactly *all* the reasons others have given.
The challenge of mass-media science-fiction is that learning a new language is difficult and slow. So they work in a magical solution… telepaths, universal translators whose exact functions are undescribed, or just having everybody speak modern English with no explanation at all for this.
Literary SF has had a few authors take a swing at working out how aliens who have nothing in common would work out a way to communicate. H Beam Piper had a good one with “Omnilingual”. Another one I remember only vaguely involved humans meeting aliens at the front of the colonization wave working its way around the spiral arms of the galaxy. The aliens turn out to be humans coming from around the other direction, with enough time having been taken that evolution produced changes so that the humans coming clockwise were unrecognizable to the humans coming from counter-clockwise.
Even if the people listening to the UP were in error, this still required both “son” and “sun” to be objects of worship on Earth.
Card made a whole taxonomy of different kinds of aliens you can’t be friends with in different ways. It always kind of bothered me.
“Card made a whole taxonomy of different kinds of aliens you can’t be friends with in different ways.”
Yeah, the Mormons were supporters of California Measure 8.
I vaguely recall the story James Pollock vaguely recalls. I thought it might be from an early-to-mid sixties GALAXY and that it might be by Robert Silverberg and that it might have a title something like “Meeting at Infinity,” but I can’t verify any of those, so consider them wild guesses (or glitches from my brain’s universal translator).
One of my favorite sf lingustics stories is Robert Sheckley’s “Shall We Have a Little Talk”? which is analyzed at length here
and this is only one of a longish series on the linguistics/sf interface on that site (including pieces on “Omnilingual” and the Darmok STAR TREK episode, already mentioned in this thread.
James Pollock (JULY 13, 2018 AT 10:04 PM) — that last one sounds like a fascinating story idea.
Yes, well, if it weren’t already a published story, I might be able to make something of it. Alas, it usually turns out that my great story ideas are already contained in stories published by someone else.
The difficult and slow challenge of learning an alien language was the central plot element of a recent movie,Arrival. I didn’t find it entirely convincing, but it made a good movie anyway. (It’s based on a short story, “The Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, but I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet.)
I also remember a story about human colonists meeting up with themselves. I’m pretty sure it was a short story. Harlan Ellison comes to mind as a possible author, but no way I would swear to that.
Harlan Ellison is likely not the right answer, since I don’t read him much.
Thinking about “Arrival” made me remember that I forgot one of the magical outs: Letting the aliens solve the problem (prime example: 2001, better executed example, 2010 or Contact).
James Pollock: I asked for help on another of my lists, and Dave Langford identified the story you were recalling: it’s by Harry Harrison, “Final Encounter” (April 1964 Galaxy).
(So I had the magazine and time period right and the title in the ballpark, but author wrong. )
Silverberg for Harrison is an easy mistake; no points deducted.
That’s the way my memory works… I remember specific details… except for the NAMES that go along with the story. I can’t tell you how frustrating that is in law school, where, of course, the names are used as shorthand for the fact pattern and legal reasoning of the ruling.
I’ve read most of Harrison’s short works. I stopped keeping up with Slippery Jim around the eighth or ninth novel, and the alternate-history stuff doesn’t appeal to me, so I didn’t follow him down that particular path, either.
Thank you, Shrug (and Dave). It’s in a collection on my shelf (Galactic Empires), with a cute intro: “Far in the future, they discovered a new natural law; what goes up must come round. …”
Harry Harrison. Yep, that’s the story I remember too. I had a hunch Ellison was wrong.
I think “The Story of Your Life” will be a big disappointment.
A staple on the old rec.arts.sf.written usenet group is the YASID, “Yet Another Story ID”.
Thanks again (to Shrug, Dave, and to James for bringing it up in the first place) for the pointer to Harrison’s “Final Encounter.” Not only did it end roughly as James said, but the alien humans had already prepared an excellent system to learn the intruding humans’ language — event though they had apparently never encountered any other aliens.
I have several versions of my name that exist – Meryl maiden married, Meryl maiden, Meryl married, Mrs. Robert married. Then there are the magazines that get my name wrong – which is good, because when they sell one’s name that is incorrect, one knows who sold their name.
Then I have my “other” name – Anne Everyman (pronounced Evramon) for my alternate 18th century self. More properly she would be Mrs. Alexander Everyman.
@ Meryl A – One person in my family used a different middle initial for each magazine subscription, for exactly the same reason. This kind of subterfuge is unnecessary here. Even before the new GDPR, German law already prohibited selling address lists (as well as cold calling).
I don’t play any of those games, but I AM amazed sometimes by the mass mailings that do find their way to me.
Just yesterday I received an advertising flyer for people new to HR (I don’t do HR, and never have) addressed to the employer I left ten years ago, at my new address that I never had during the time I was employed there.
Maybe they got my address from the collection agency that sent me a letter about the unpaid bills the phone company sent me (at my new address) after I sold my house and no longer had phone or Internet service. They sent the bills to my new address, which tells me that part of their billing operation was on top of things while another, more important, part was totally incompetent at their job. OK, easy mistake to make except they kept doing it after I sent them a letter pointing out that they were trying to bill me for service they weren’t providing to me, and I could prove it because someone else owns that property and lives there and I live somewhere else and say, you’re already sending the bills to the somewhere else where I don’t have a phone line, and if I did it would have been provided by a different local telephone company. They sent it out for collections, too.
I don’t want to name names but yes, actually, I do to. Frontier Communications. The service was excellent when it was Verizon, because I lived in a well-off neighborhood that got undated equipment, not one of the poor neighborhoods where they let the copper networks sit and rot. The handover from Verizon to Frontier went smoothly, as well. But both the customer-service and the billing operations dropped the ball, and kept falling over trying to pick it back up.
Ranting over. Please continue with your usual daily routine.
Kilby – glad someone has that kind of law.
James Pollack – we have Verizon copper wire service and work hard at keeping it. After Hurricane Sandy I had to try to contact members of my embroidery chapter to tell them that the meeting was being canceled. I was able to reach two other members who also had copper wire service. Everyone else we had to hope that they would figure out the meeting was canceled.
When the electricity goes out – I have my copper wire phone to call the electric company and let them know. Yes, I have a cell phone – but if I use it for all this when I have no electricity I will need to figure out how to recharge it.
The copper line phone – just pick it up and if there is phone service (which for some reason goes out so less often than the electricity ) I have phone service and “Apple can call me 12 times in 3 days while I am away and tell me that my device can no longer be used – even though I don’t have one.
On the other side – we happen to own a very small amount of shares in both Verizon and Frontier – and the latter is holding on by its finger nails. After reorganizing it self and issuing new shares, they stopped paying dividends – and their dividends before this were return of capital, not actual dividends.
Comics I Don't Understand 
By using “Mrs. Rick Caucus”, it labels Mr. Rick Caucus’ status as married….there would be no Mrs. if he wasn’t. It compares to the Miss label. This is actually quite clever.
I don’t get why he could possibly think people don’t use “Ms.” still. What else would we call women? “Hey, You”?
>>”it labels Mr. Rick Caucus’ status as married….there would be no Mrs. ”
There’d be no Mr. Rick Caucus either. His last name is Redfern. I think the idea is that the letter is for him– the spouse of the Ms. Caucus. Caucus is her name; not his.
When I was in junior high school and “Ms.” came around, I thought of it as a godsend: I could never remember which of my female teachers were “Miss” and which were “Mrs.” even by year’s end. It always came out of my mouth sounding kind of like “Ms” anyway.
(hell, maybe I inspired it)
And now, suddenly, I never had to worry about that again.
One of the questions that women are asked… but not men… is whether or not they plan to change their name when they get married. It’s a bit of a bother, with much paperwork involved. When Ms. Jane Doe becomes Mrs. Jane Roe her identity changes (to the outside world). Some people, coincidentally nearly all women, think this is a big deal.
The extreme version of this is the (largely archaic) form wherein Ms. Jane Doe becomes Mrs. Richard Roe, ceding almost her entire former identity, becoming a foreign growth upon her new husband’s identity.
I’m a dude, so I didn’t have these sorts of things to worry about when I got married. It wasn’t a big deal, then… to me. I’m sympathetic enough to assume that it might have been different to the woman I married, but burned by the divorce to not care how it affected the woman I divorced. (The advice I give my daughter on how to achieve a successful marriage is “don’t marry a crazy woman”.)
Joanie is right… the title of address for men doesn’t care if he is married, thus suggesting that there is equal validity to either status. Not so for women, who have different titles of address for their married and unmarried states, suggesting that one of these states is worthy of note, if not both, in assessing a woman’s worth.
The fact that there exist people who would use the archaic form of address, in which a woman exists solely as an aspect of her husband, is worthy of a shudder. (although, admittedly, this is so because there ALSO exist women who tolerate, even perpetuate, this form of address.)
I still think the letter is addressed to Joanie. The writer assumes she took his name. No shudder for Rick. 😂
chipchristian – the fact that people are still using that form of address for women should have caused him a shudder.
James Pollock – It’s not just as a man that you weren’t asked. It’s as a man who got married long enough ago. (I got a much more polite version of the question once, but because I *had* assumed my husband’s name, and was having trouble remembering it, “what’s your name now?” came across as a pop quiz, and I answered badly.)
Here’s a thought. Address the person by name. There is no need for “Mr.”, “Ms” or whatever if you’re an adult.
This looks like a current/recent strip… how could Rick not be aware “Ms.” is still used? It’s been close to universal in most business settings for twenty years, no?
As a health care worker in the back-country South I found the “Miz” title more than acceptable – see Walt Kelly’s use with Miz Hepzibah. I decry young colleagues’ use of first names to address patients, sending shudders as above. If you put Miz with the first name, well, that goes down easier. Cold calls or importuning letters addressing me by first name likely get a quick deep six.
Mark, nearly all written communication still uses a title of some sort. For in person conversations, just a first name is fine. However with kids, there are different standards. Kids are expected to NOT use an adult’s first name. When I was growing up, we were expected to call our friends’ parents by Mr. or Mrs. LastName. However, with my kids (and approval from the affected neighbors), my kids called them Mr. or Miss (Miz) FirstName. But that was in Florida. Now that we are in Illinois, the trend here seems to be back to Mrs. LastName. What I always find funny is when kids in the classroom don’t know our last name and so greet me as “ChildName’s Mom”. It does make me feel a bit odd, like that’s my only role in life, when of course, it isn’t.
With what zookeeper said about calls, the best thing about wanting callers to use your last name is if yours is hard to pronounce. My maiden name was, and it made it very easy to tell friends from junk callers before we had caller ID.
The other way to look at name change at marriage is as a free opportunity to do so (well, not “free” in time, but “free” in terms of stigma etc.: if you walk into your bank tomorrow as a single woman and say “I’m changing my last name from X to Y”, they’re likely to make it harder than if you say “I just got married and my new last name is Y”).
I know a few couples where both have changed last name: man named AB marries woman named XY, both change last name to AY or XB or some other combination.
” For in person conversations, just a first name is fine.”
Except where it isn’t, of course. Imagine Captain Kirk (or Ensign Redshirt) addressing Mr. Spock by his first name…
There’s no real reason, other than a historical tradition of matching up a woman to the most significant male person in her life because for her, marriage is the only way to achieve any social status at all, why the marriage of Ms. Jane Doe and Mr. Richard Roe can’t leave two people afterwards named Mr. Richard Roe and Ms. Jane Doe.
Hollywood is leading us there, and not just because Hollywood marriages tend towards the brief side, and not just because people pick stage names, either. Screen-acting is also one of the few fields where a woman can have a significant interest in her own name, which is more valuable than her interest in his. Lucille Ball spent considerable time and effort making people know who Lucille Ball was. Lucille Arnaz, on the other hand, would have been a stranger with no screen credits. So “Lucille Ball” stayed “Lucille Ball”, even though everyone knew she and Desi were married. And she stayed “Lucille Ball” when they weren’t married any more, as well. Elizabeth Taylor was well-known for having several marriages. As Elizabeth Taylor. Zsa-Zsa Gabor, had the same dynamic, to a lesser extent (and a substantially lesser acting career.)
At the other end, Courtney Cox became Courtney Cox Arquette, and it was funny enough that all the other cast members added “Arquette” to their names in the credits for one episode, when her name was changed in the credits.
Spock’s first name was never spoken on-screen, but was referred to in one episode as “unpronounceable.” Semi-canon novels have it as “S’chn T’gai” and some non-canon fan fiction has “Xtmprsqzntwlfd.” The actress who played Spock’s mother said it was “Harold.” The more you know.
Here’s how it worked years ago. Susan Smith would have been “Miss Smith” her whole life as long as she never married. If she married John Jones she would then become “Mrs. John Jones” and if he died only then would she be addressed as “Mrs. Susan Jones”. Here Joanie doesn’t like the way society 1) categorizes women by marital status as if that is the most important aspect of who women are, and 2) identifies women not as who they are themselves, but only who they are in relation to a man.
wwozy, the letter can’t be for Rick because it is addressed to “Mrs.” I think the shudder is about the assumption that he took her name, not vice versa as was common practice.
My daughter and her husband got around this problem by inventing a new last name and both taking it.
Sorry, woozy.
Ah, now Miz Ma’m’selle Hepzibah, there was a lady!
What bugs me is being referred to as “Mr. (first name)” when I’m dealing with people, usually business transactions over the phone with representatives who obviously aren’t in the US.
When my wife and I got married in the late 70s, we put a lot of thought into this.
Just kidding. About a month before the wedding I said “You going to keep your maiden name?” and she said “I don’t know, I guess maybe I’ll change it.” This is the sort of brilliant advance planning that resulted in us flying to Europe a day after the wedding (and then back again a week later) with her passport showing her old name and her tickets showing her new name. Can you imagine that happening today and nobody noticing? We’d probably both be sent to Gitmo.
My recollection from older etiquette guides was that a married woman whose husband died would still be “Mrs. John Jones”. She would only be properly addressed as “Mrs. Susan Jones” if they divorced. But most of that sort of thing has gone away or become situational.
As an aside, as I recall etiquette expert “Miss Manners” was an early and enthusiastic supporter of “Ms.”.
re “I know a few couples where both have changed last name: man named AB marries woman named XY, both change last name to AY or XB or some other combination.”
Me too. Also know one couple where he just took her last name — his was Arabic, hers Germanic, and I imaginehe assumed (probably correctly) he’d fit in more easily in the U.S. with the latter.
And a friend of a friend took name of husband when they married and kept it after divorce, rather than going back to her original name, which had been “Ramsbottom.” Sounded reasonable to me. (And yes, she was Australian. . . )
The current Mrs. Shrug prefers a form of her first name which is far more often encountered for men than for women, and her last name and my own middle and last names are all commonly spelled two or three different ways (including by relatives), so we have lots of ways for unwanted mail come-on artists to get things wrong, along with telephone spammers who get me and assume they are speaking to “Mr.” [wife’s last name].
BBBB, there is always the possibility that the person doing that is from a far east nation, where the last name is printed first. They may not know we do it differently here, and are trying to be respectful, but missing the mark. I’m sure they get the same issue by ignorant westerners who assume the last name written is the family name. Or it could just be junk callers thinking they can get on your good side by being overly familiar, as zookeeper mentioned.
@ CaroZ – Doonesbury is in reruns for weekday strips, but Sundays are new material. This one is from 17-Sep-2017.
“The current Mrs. Shrug. . .”
I hope that’s not how you introduce her in person!
“I hope that’s not how you introduce her in person!”
My primary offspring unit has kind of gotten used to being introduced that way. I think the one with a valid complaint would be the backup unit. But I don’t have one… all my eggs are in the one basket, so to speak.
James, it might be a bit of bother, but my wife took good advantage of it. Years earlier, she had ditched the use of her first name and started using her middle name. Then she got married, took his name, then got divorced and found herself with some contacts using her maiden surname and some using the now-ex’s surname. So when we got married, she used the situation to simplify things, declaring herself Her-middle-name My-surname. That’s it, just two words, including my four-letter surname. First name gone, both prior surnames gone.
Dyfsunctional, I have a feeling they quietly dropped the “unpronounceable name” thing: by the time we met Sarek and the rest of the crew, Vulcans were routinely referring to one another by their simple names.
Boise Ed, I am oddly reminded of the Grandfather’s Axe paradox.
For what it’s worth, I know several men who changed their names upon marriage.
a) step-brother-in-law changed his name to match his wife’s family. He didn’t really love his own name, nor was he close to his family.
b) a friend of my husband’s was also not quite close to his family, so he and his wife both changed their names to a conglomeration (not a hyphenation) of both names. Think “smith” and “jones” becoming “smines” rather than “smith-jones.” They’re both quite happy with their new name, and passed it on to their daughter.
c) my dad’s “dad” was really his step-dad. Although he grew up using his step-dad’s name, he was never formally adopted. When he was old enough to get a job, he needed to get a social security card (back then you didn’t get a number until you went to work) and asked his mom for his birth certificate, at which point he learned that his name wasn’t what he thought it was. He went on using the “wrong” name until he married my mother several years later, at which point they both switched to the right name. This confused my mom’s friends: “wait, you’re BOTH changing your name?”
My dad’s first name is Guy. It’s pronounced “guy” as in “that guy over there who likes coffee.” We used to be quite able to determine it was a telemarketer phoning if they used the French pronunciation and called him “Gee.” (And then attempted to French-ify our non-French last name.
Tree, I once had a couple of friends who chose a completely new surname, unrelated to either of their old ones. Someday, that’s going to drive some genealogist nuts.
Bill, I see a big distinction between changing a name and changing the object (axe) itself.
Boise Ed, I did say “oddly reminded.”
A friend of mine with surname Jones married a chap with surname Jones (they are both Welsh) – hard to know if she changed her name or not.
A colleague changed her name and passport on marriage – and then decided it was a mistake and changed it all back a year or so later (though she stayed married, and is still married 30 years on).
A friend had a similar issue as Tree’s c) example. When I met her as a teen, in the South of England in the 1970s, she had a surname, and a father and, so she thought, grandfather with the same name. But after her dad died in the 80s she found that his bio-dad had been someone else but had died in 1929 when the infant was two. Her dad had lived under his mother’s new husband’s surname all his life, but officially it was something else. The odd twist is, in 1977 I took my friend on a trip to the North of England 250 miles from where we met & lived, and we stayed in my brother’s house in Bradford (a 19thC one-up, one-down, back-to-back terraced house on a cobbled street with outdoor loo). Only 5+ years later, when her father died and the family saw their real grandfather’s name and address at the time of his marriage in 1925, did she find out this man, a grandfather she didn’t know she had, had lived five doors up from my brother’s house but 52 years before she visited. (And being a narrow terrace, I imagine that was about 120 feet away!)
Angela Merkel, German chancellor, goes by the surname of a man she was only married to for five years and divorced in 1982. She has been married to someone else for 20 years, but uses neither his name nor her birth surname.
Inspector Morse of book and then TV police fame had a mysterious first name which was finally revealed to be Endeavour. A later prequel TV series set when he was a young policeman was called Endeavour.
A friend, who is on his second marriage, refers to “the present Mrs Brown”, though I don’t think he introduces her to new people like that. Anyway, he has got away with it for 20+ years.
I went to a Quaker school. Traditionally Quakers avoided honorifics and titles and would address each other as Firstname Lastname, like William Penn and George Fox, though at school we were supposed to call the teachers Mr Thisandthat, and in a rare case (it was a boys’ school), Miss Someone. But this was pre-Ms.
re A friend of mine with surname Jones married a chap with surname Jones (they are both Welsh) – hard to know if she changed her name or not.
**************
I knew a similar couple, but they were both Andersons. (And not Welsh.)
Perhaps the most famous (at least in the U.S.) case of “impossible to tell if either changed hir name” was the marraige of Franklin Roosevelt and his distant cousin Eleanor Roosevelt.
I wonder how often, in Korea, a Kim marries a Kim.
I can’t find it again, but there was a Q&A somewhere and someone asked why some women won’t take their new husband’s last name. One reply was BECAUSE MY LAST NAME IS BEST. It was from Emily Best.
I knew two men who changed their names after marriage. These are not the exact names but similar to the names. One was a pre-med student named Edward Lash, but he went by Edward Harrison Lash, Harrison being his mother’s maiden name. He got his M.D. and married his longtime girlfriend Helen Petesky and became Edward Harrison Lash-Petesky. I thought “Lash-Petesky” sounded more like an item on a Polish restaurant’s menu than a doctor’s last name.
The other was Michael Smith (again, not the exact name but about as common a name). His second wife was Kathy Zoleray. Michael is a composer but there already is a music critic named Michael Smith, a producer named Michael Smith and an architect named Michael Smith (you can probably guess the real name). So Michael changed his name to Michael Zoleray and divorced Kathy Zoleray not long after but is still Michael Zoleray now.
CIDU Bill, Kims marry Kims all the time. I worked with a woman from China named Chen, married to a man from China named Chen. In China, women don’t change their names.
MiB, that was a rhetorical question: it’s probably a rare wedding in Korea that DOESN’T unite two Kims.
“My legal name is now Eleanor Roosevelt, but I’m going to continue to be known professionally as Eleanor Roosevelt.”
Did anybody ever explain why Joanie expected Rick to shudder?
“Did anybody ever explain why Joanie expected Rick to shudder?”
Well, I *thought* I did.
Rick doesn’t know what it’s like to have your identity tied up into someone else’s. This is because men’s names don’t change (typically) as their lives progress. Women, however, are expected to change their names just because they’ve changed marital status.
Then an item of mail comes (mis-)addressed to the name Rick would have had if he’d been expected to take on his spouse’s name in marriage. It’s incorrect, but the sender actually believed they were properly addressing someone.
I’m surprised that Rick wouldn’t know that Joanie still uses “Ms.” as her preferred title of address. They’ve been married for something like 35 years (real time; I don’t know if it’s supposed to be that long in comic strip time). And it’s certainly a convenient title to be used when writing to a woman whose marital status you don’t know and which is irrelevant under the circumstances (i.e. when writing for business purposes). From working in Washington, D.C., I would expect Rick to know lots of people who used the title “Ms.” either for themselves or when addressing others.
There was even a Doonesbury compilation book titled Dare to Be Great, Ms. Caucus, although the strip from which that title was taken predated Joanie and Rick’s marriage.
Bill: ‘I have a feeling they quietly dropped the “unpronounceable name” thing: by the time we met Sarek and the rest of the crew’
I’m actually pretty sure that the first reference to unpronounceable Vulcan names is in Sarek’s only TOS appearance, Journey to Babel.
Kirk refers to Amanda as ‘Mrs Sarek’, and she corrects him.
AMANDA: Amanda. I’m afraid you couldn’t pronounce the Vulcan name.
KIRK: Can you?
AMANDA: After a fashion, and after many years of practice. Shall we continue the tour? My husband did request it.
I’ve never been sure if she meant her Vulcan family name (given the ‘Mrs Only One Name’ reference she was correcting), or that she was given a Vulcan personal name. Either way, this doesn’t necessarily suggest that all Vulcans have unpronounceable names, just that they exist and Amanda has one.
As I recall, according to the Trek blooper reel, Spock’s first name is “Leonard”.
narmitaj’s comment reminds me: Through accident and huge hassle of getting everything reissued in a new name, my mother got stuck with the name of husband #2, whom she was married to for 9 months. Regarding other situations where title matters: Airline tickets. They ask partly so they know which gender you are. I use MRS if MS isn’t available because I am no MISS.
Mark In Boston: I read a book called Chen Village that was about life in a small rural community in China, from (roughly) the 50’s to the 90’s. Early on, the tradition was that Chen’s weren’t supposed to marry Chen’s, because they was considered incest. It was a hardship because it made it hard to find a spouse in the village, and for various reasons it was hard to find a spouse outside the village. By the end of the book, standards had been relaxed, and Chen-Chen marriage was considered acceptable.
WW: your post sounds like it has a shaggy dog story trying to emerge from it. Maybe if you add some a sho-gun and Bea families, there might be a punchline there somewhere…
“I wonder how often, in Korea, a Kim marries a Kim.”
And in various places, a “first name Kim” might marry a “last name Kim”.
I should amend what I wrote: “unpronounceable name” made its debut with that episode, but was retconned by “Amok Time,” when we met a ton of Vulcans all referring to one another by simple names.
They had the Universal Translator throughout the original series.
Even accepting the inherent illogic of a Universal Translator, it’s hard to imagine it translating proper names.
I recall one ST episode where, thanks to the universal translator, our heroes believed the alien civilization they were contacting “worshiped the sun” — only to find eventually they were some sort of neo-Christian variety who “worshiped the Son.” So apparently the universal translator liked puns (no matter how unlikely it would have happened to work out thus in an alien language), just to mess with Federation minds or something?.
(Not a translator thing, but I was also really bothered by an episode where we were told today was “Thanksgiving back on Earth.” I assume Canada lost out on the “let’s just pick one day for it, O.K.?” negotiations, and even harder cheese for all of those former Earth nations who wouldn’t have had a reason for celebrating such a holiday at all.)
Th “worship the Son” episode was best forgotten. Along with the equally-contrived nonsense with the misspelled variation of the Declaration of Independence.
Bill: In Darmok, the universal translator can’t understand anything the aliens are saying, but it can apparently still translate the proper names well enough for the crew to look them up in the ship’s computer. Which are in there despite the fact that no one has been able to communicate with these aliens before. Go figure.
Shrug: What bothered me more about that was the idea that all civilations go through a “bad phase” where they worship the sun, and a “good phase” where they worship the Son. (It would make sense if the show was written by Christian apologists, but it seemed nonsensical in the context of an otherwise atheistic show.)
In Darmok, my understanding was that the UP translated everything just fine: but without context, it was useless.
Like if a Frenchman said “C’est comme si Harry avait menti à Alice au sujet de la jambe de la reine.” The UP (or Google) will tell you it means “This is like the time Harry lied to Alice about the Queen’s leg,” which is both completely accurate and totally worthless.
(I was going to go with “Une promenade de neuf mile n’est pas une blague, surtout sous la pluie.,” but that would have been distractingly esoteric)
Unless, in this planet’s language, “son ” and “sun” were also homophones, there’s no way the UP would make this mistake.
Unless this were a stunning coincidence.
The notion that each person has one proper name and that it’s somehow indissolubly linked to their identity (so changing it affects that identity, and so that being called other things, like “Bob’s Mom” is weird) is very occidecentric.
So, a question: can anyone identify an old SF story in which someone ends up in the distant future where (among other predictable things, like inflation) there’s a custom of contextual naming? As I recall it went something like parent and offspring both calling each other “mom” because that’s unambiguous in that context. But I only vaguely remember and may be conflating multiple things…
“Unless, in this planet’s language, “son ” and “sun” were also homophones, there’s no way the UP would make this mistake.”
Well, maybe the UP didn’t make the mistake but everyone listening to the UP made the mistake.
… But honestly, I *hated* the idea for exactly *all* the reasons others have given.
The challenge of mass-media science-fiction is that learning a new language is difficult and slow. So they work in a magical solution… telepaths, universal translators whose exact functions are undescribed, or just having everybody speak modern English with no explanation at all for this.
Literary SF has had a few authors take a swing at working out how aliens who have nothing in common would work out a way to communicate. H Beam Piper had a good one with “Omnilingual”. Another one I remember only vaguely involved humans meeting aliens at the front of the colonization wave working its way around the spiral arms of the galaxy. The aliens turn out to be humans coming from around the other direction, with enough time having been taken that evolution produced changes so that the humans coming clockwise were unrecognizable to the humans coming from counter-clockwise.
Even if the people listening to the UP were in error, this still required both “son” and “sun” to be objects of worship on Earth.
Card made a whole taxonomy of different kinds of aliens you can’t be friends with in different ways. It always kind of bothered me.
“Card made a whole taxonomy of different kinds of aliens you can’t be friends with in different ways.”
Yeah, the Mormons were supporters of California Measure 8.
I vaguely recall the story James Pollock vaguely recalls. I thought it might be from an early-to-mid sixties GALAXY and that it might be by Robert Silverberg and that it might have a title something like “Meeting at Infinity,” but I can’t verify any of those, so consider them wild guesses (or glitches from my brain’s universal translator).
One of my favorite sf lingustics stories is Robert Sheckley’s “Shall We Have a Little Talk”? which is analyzed at length here
http://tenser.typepad.com/tenser_said_the_tensor/2006/09/shall_we_have_a.html
and this is only one of a longish series on the linguistics/sf interface on that site (including pieces on “Omnilingual” and the Darmok STAR TREK episode, already mentioned in this thread.
James Pollock (JULY 13, 2018 AT 10:04 PM) — that last one sounds like a fascinating story idea.
Yes, well, if it weren’t already a published story, I might be able to make something of it. Alas, it usually turns out that my great story ideas are already contained in stories published by someone else.
The difficult and slow challenge of learning an alien language was the central plot element of a recent movie,Arrival. I didn’t find it entirely convincing, but it made a good movie anyway. (It’s based on a short story, “The Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, but I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet.)
I also remember a story about human colonists meeting up with themselves. I’m pretty sure it was a short story. Harlan Ellison comes to mind as a possible author, but no way I would swear to that.
Harlan Ellison is likely not the right answer, since I don’t read him much.
Thinking about “Arrival” made me remember that I forgot one of the magical outs: Letting the aliens solve the problem (prime example: 2001, better executed example, 2010 or Contact).
James Pollock: I asked for help on another of my lists, and Dave Langford identified the story you were recalling: it’s by Harry Harrison, “Final Encounter” (April 1964 Galaxy).
(So I had the magazine and time period right and the title in the ballpark, but author wrong. )
Silverberg for Harrison is an easy mistake; no points deducted.
That’s the way my memory works… I remember specific details… except for the NAMES that go along with the story. I can’t tell you how frustrating that is in law school, where, of course, the names are used as shorthand for the fact pattern and legal reasoning of the ruling.
I’ve read most of Harrison’s short works. I stopped keeping up with Slippery Jim around the eighth or ninth novel, and the alternate-history stuff doesn’t appeal to me, so I didn’t follow him down that particular path, either.
Thank you, Shrug (and Dave). It’s in a collection on my shelf (Galactic Empires), with a cute intro: “Far in the future, they discovered a new natural law; what goes up must come round. …”
Harry Harrison. Yep, that’s the story I remember too. I had a hunch Ellison was wrong.
I think “The Story of Your Life” will be a big disappointment.
A staple on the old rec.arts.sf.written usenet group is the YASID, “Yet Another Story ID”.
Thanks again (to Shrug, Dave, and to James for bringing it up in the first place) for the pointer to Harrison’s “Final Encounter.” Not only did it end roughly as James said, but the alien humans had already prepared an excellent system to learn the intruding humans’ language — event though they had apparently never encountered any other aliens.
I have several versions of my name that exist – Meryl maiden married, Meryl maiden, Meryl married, Mrs. Robert married. Then there are the magazines that get my name wrong – which is good, because when they sell one’s name that is incorrect, one knows who sold their name.
Then I have my “other” name – Anne Everyman (pronounced Evramon) for my alternate 18th century self. More properly she would be Mrs. Alexander Everyman.
@ Meryl A – One person in my family used a different middle initial for each magazine subscription, for exactly the same reason. This kind of subterfuge is unnecessary here. Even before the new GDPR, German law already prohibited selling address lists (as well as cold calling).
I don’t play any of those games, but I AM amazed sometimes by the mass mailings that do find their way to me.
Just yesterday I received an advertising flyer for people new to HR (I don’t do HR, and never have) addressed to the employer I left ten years ago, at my new address that I never had during the time I was employed there.
Maybe they got my address from the collection agency that sent me a letter about the unpaid bills the phone company sent me (at my new address) after I sold my house and no longer had phone or Internet service. They sent the bills to my new address, which tells me that part of their billing operation was on top of things while another, more important, part was totally incompetent at their job. OK, easy mistake to make except they kept doing it after I sent them a letter pointing out that they were trying to bill me for service they weren’t providing to me, and I could prove it because someone else owns that property and lives there and I live somewhere else and say, you’re already sending the bills to the somewhere else where I don’t have a phone line, and if I did it would have been provided by a different local telephone company. They sent it out for collections, too.
I don’t want to name names but yes, actually, I do to. Frontier Communications. The service was excellent when it was Verizon, because I lived in a well-off neighborhood that got undated equipment, not one of the poor neighborhoods where they let the copper networks sit and rot. The handover from Verizon to Frontier went smoothly, as well. But both the customer-service and the billing operations dropped the ball, and kept falling over trying to pick it back up.
Ranting over. Please continue with your usual daily routine.
Kilby – glad someone has that kind of law.
James Pollack – we have Verizon copper wire service and work hard at keeping it. After Hurricane Sandy I had to try to contact members of my embroidery chapter to tell them that the meeting was being canceled. I was able to reach two other members who also had copper wire service. Everyone else we had to hope that they would figure out the meeting was canceled.
When the electricity goes out – I have my copper wire phone to call the electric company and let them know. Yes, I have a cell phone – but if I use it for all this when I have no electricity I will need to figure out how to recharge it.
The copper line phone – just pick it up and if there is phone service (which for some reason goes out so less often than the electricity ) I have phone service and “Apple can call me 12 times in 3 days while I am away and tell me that my device can no longer be used – even though I don’t have one.
On the other side – we happen to own a very small amount of shares in both Verizon and Frontier – and the latter is holding on by its finger nails. After reorganizing it self and issuing new shares, they stopped paying dividends – and their dividends before this were return of capital, not actual dividends.