Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2011-08-17:

"I feel proud to be English, proud to be a Londoner (all right, an Essex boy), never more so than since being in exile, and I naturally began to wonder what would make young people destroy their communities...

"However "unacceptable" and "unjustifiable" [this rioting] might be, it has happened so we better accept it and, whilst we can't justify it, we should kick around a few neurons and work out why so many people feel utterly disconnected from the cities they live in....

"If we want to live in a society where people feel included, we must include them, where they feel represented, we must represent them and where they feel love and compassion for their communities then we, the members of that community, must find love and compassion for them.

"As we sweep away the mistakes made in the selfish, nocturnal darkness we must ensure that, amidst the broken glass and sadness, we don't sweep away the youth lost amongst the shards in the shadows cast by the new dawn."

-- Russell Brand, on the London riots.

[ http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/11/london-riots-davidcameron?CMP=NECNETTXT8187]

(submitted to the mailing list by Trevor Goodyear)

I am one of those privileged folks who can afford to use my "real name"^[*] ('etymonym'?) for my web presence. The "common names" by which I am currently most known by can be interpolated from my etymonym, so I'm reasonably findable-ish -- more so if I can make a nickname or two visible along with it. And partly through choices made decades ago, partly through not having anything much to lose, and a whole lot from not being in the most endangered minorities^[**] or living/working in circumstances where danger to such minorities is a constant threat ... a whole lot from having white privilege and the not-insignificant privilege of a middle-class background (this is part of the foundation the aforementioned relative safety is built upon) even though I currently lack any semblance of middle-class finances ... I can afford to post the vast majority of what it occurs to me to write, under my findable, real-world etymonym.

As has been painstakingly noted elsewhere several times, many people lack that safety that allows me to post all sorts of stuff under my easy-to-find-me-in-meatspace name. And as has been adequately, if less emphatically documented elsewhere, some people who want to be found are not findable under anything Google considers a "real" name because their common names bear no resemblance to their legal names.

I even have a non-scary, non-'weird', WASPonym, so even to folks who want to make sure their user base doesn't look 'foreign' or 'minority' to a provincial USian audience, I should still be in safe territory.

I'm a geek, I have a lot of friends, I'm chock full of "can afford to blog under my meatspace name" privilege, and my name is safely WASPy. If I weren't so badly put off by Google's lack of concern for my pseudonymous-for-safety friends and acquaintances, unhelpfulness to my known-for-years-by-handle / unfindable-under-wallet-name friends, and lack of respect for "funny-named furriners", I'd be a perfect fit for Google Plus, wouldn't I?

My legal signature, the name on my debit card, the name on my checks, my name on snail-mail catalogs and newsletters and utility bills addressed to me, my name in recording credits and theatre programs and in copyright notices on my tunes and photos, the name displayed on my vanity website, the human-name field that appears in From: headers on email I send and Usenet articles I post, these all match, though admittedly I do use a shortened form when introducing myself in a spoken, rather than written, medium, and I do use a rearranged version as my SCA / Markland / RenFest persona-name. This would fit pretty much anyone's notion of a "real" name, right?

Maybe not. If I understand correctly, Google wants a "first name" and a "last name" with no spaces and only particular punctuation. Since my real name / common name is in the first-initial+middle-name+last-name+generational-suffix format^[***], it looks like I only have a few choices:

• Ignore the no-spaces rule and enter "D. Glenn" for a first name and "Arthur Jr." for a last name (this works on some sites) and hope I don't get punted for not following their directions,
• Strip it down to the spoken form, "Glenn Arthur", which bumps me into the hard-to-tell-apart-from-similarly-named-people category (so much for the "easier to find you if you use [our perverse notion of] your real name" business), or
• Use my actual first name ... which, last I checked, few of my friends, almost none of my acquaintances, and none of the not-even-acquaintances who've read my stories, essays, poems, etc., even know (utterly defeating the purpose).

Doing a Google web search on "D. Glenn Arthur Jr." (with quotes), ninety eight of the first hundred hits actually referred to me. (Not all especially usefully, but all me.) Using "Glenn Arthur", only five of the first hundred hits had anything to do with me, though one was at least in the first page of results, so it could've been worse. (With my name as I write it, you have to go all the way to the fourth page to find the first result that isn't clearly me, and the seventh page to find the next one.)

Now I may not really have standing to complain about this, given that I've already said I've been put off of Google Plus by their failure to accomodate so many people I know (and even more I'm learning about) with really good reasons for using pseudonyms (and I'm not too happy about the folks with weaker reasons for uing pseudonyms getting screwed either). But I do feel impelled to point out that even for what Google thinks of as "real names", and the kinds of real names they seem to want (i.e. not-scary-to-provincial-WASPs), their approach to names is Fundamentally Broken.

So even if you spot them the "real names are more civil" thing (uh, refuted in a recent study, n'est-ce pas?) and the "no 'funny-looking' names" bigotry, they're still being stupid. If you're going to stake so much reputation on your insistence on folks using Real Names, then you have to accomodate real-world real names. I find it that much harder to take seriously any of the "real names" arguments of Google and its supporters in the nymwars, when they're not even making a serious attempt to handle real names.

But hey, I guess it helps me resist any temptation to sign up (to be able to post comments) despite my distaste for the no-pseudos policy.

[*] Let's brush aside for now the whole question of what the %$#@ "real" means here. That's a whole 'nuther, longer essay, innit?

[**] Not to minimize the risk of violence from being trans, but that's more likely to be triggered in person. AFAICT, there are more dangerous things to be out as online.

[***] "But first-initial-middle-name is unusual..." Well, just off the top of my head: F. Scott Fitzgerald, L. Frank Baum, J. Edgar Hoover, G. Gordon Liddy, J. Michael Straczynski; a few selected results from S'ingTFW: C. Northcote Parkinson, E. Allan Farnsworth, E. Power Biggs, F. Lee Bailey, H. Ross Perot, J. Paul Getty, J. Robert Oppenheimer, L. Ron Hubbard, L. Sprague de Camp, T. Boone Pickens, T. Rowe Price ... and goodness knows how many non-famous ones! It may be a less common format percentagewise, but it's a long way from being "rare".