How will he know he’s part of your family?

(Yes, someone genuinely said this!) If you have to rely on your last name to know who your family is, then your family has done something very wrong indeed. Or you’re adopted… in which case you’ll probably have your adoptive parents’ last name anyway. Or there’s been some other dramatic event severing ties with your family. In which case your last name is the last of your worries.

It’ll make things really hard for future genealogists.

Fine. I like to give them a challenge. Not that I think, given how good record keeping is now, that this will be much of a challenge. But it may at least be sort of interesting for them.

It’s not traditional.

Fine. I don’t see any point in being traditional for the sake of it. Besides, it sort of is traditional in Wales, as it happens. Since there are so few Welsh surnames (and they’re seen by some as something of an English imposition), lots of Welsh kids use given last names. I find it very intriguing that people seem happier with the idea when I tell them this. As if anything is justified by being traditional somewhere.

If you’re worried about him only sharing a name with one of you, then isn’t it worse that he’ll share his name with neither of you?

This sort of misses the point, which is that we don’t want his relationship with one of us to be emphasised more than his relationship with the other. In any case, I rather like the idea that, instead of his simply inheriting one of our names automatically, he’ll get a name that we worked together to choose specially for him

It’ll cause him no end of trouble filling in forms.

No it won’t. He has a first name and a last name, and a birth certificate to prove it. He’ll be in no worse a position than anyone else. In fact, it’ll be easier for him than for me, since I’ve always used my second name instead of my first (my parents’ choice, not mine). And that can get annoying.

He’ll be bullied.

If I genuinely thought this would make him much more likely to be bullied, I wouldn’t have done it. But I’m simply not convinced that it will, particularly given how many kids there already are who have a different name from at least one of their parents.

You’ll have to take his birth certificate along with you on flights and things.

This may be a little annoying, but it’ll be annoying for us than for him. And I don’t think it’s a very big issue.

So what do you gain?

No one actually asked us this, but I think it’s worth answering. What we gain is that we’ve given him what I think is a nice name, which is a little unusual, but which doesn’t sound too weird, and which we thought very carefully about before choosing. My wife doesn’t feel that her family’s been ignored at the expense of mine, and I don’t feel that mine has been at the expense of hers.

And if it turns out he grows up and doesn’t like it for some reason, he’s free to change it if he wants!

We had a number of options. Some people in the same circumstances give the child one of the parents’ two surnames. We didn’t want to do that because neither of us has a particularly interesting surname that we were keen to pass on, and because we didn’t like the idea of emphasising our son’s relationship with one of us, but not the other.

Another option is to combine the parents’ surnames. But we don’t especially like double-barrelled names, and, what’s more, they don’t really solve the problem: You have to make equally difficult decisions about which name comes first, and they get unsustainable after a generation or two. There was also no obvious way of merging our names more creatively to come up with something we liked.

Then we considered the Welsh option of calling our sons X ap Gareth, and our daughters X ferch Lottie (you can read more about this here), or some variation on this. But this still involved emphasising our son’s relationship with one of us, but not the other.

Then it occurred to us that you to don’t need make reference to the parents’ names at all. So we didn’t. When we filled in the birth-certificate form at the hospital, we put Iorwerth in the first-name box and Rowan in the last-name box. Rowan was just a name we happened to like (in fact it was in the running as a first name for quite a while). We’ll choose other last names for our other children.

No one since his birth has criticised our decision. When we suggested it to people before the birth, however, we were quite surprised by the negative reactions. Some people liked the idea very much. Others disliked it a lot. I also posted a question in the relevant section on Yahoo! Answers to see what people there would say. The reaction was very negative. Perversely, however, we were encouraged that we were doing the right thing. This is mainly because no one came up with a negative consequence that we thought believable and which would affect him rather than us. As far as I can see, the main disadvantage to doing this is that we may need to take his birth certificate along on certain occasions in case officials or school teachers refuse to believe we’re his parents. I can live with that.

I’ll list the main counter-arguments (and my responses) in a follow-up post, because I think they’re interesting. But to some extent I’m more interested in why some people seemed to dislike the idea so much. Part of it is probably that people get very uneasy when anyone does anything unconventional with children, however innocuous it may be. Another possibility (perhaps a superset of the other) is that a lot of people are simply much more conservative than I’d realised, and any flouting of normal practice puts them a little on edge. There’s another possibility as well. Some meat-eaters respond to vegetarians almost as if they’re offended by the vegetarians’ not eating meat, and I think this is because they take the vegetarians’ lifestyles as an implicit criticism of their own lifestyles. In the same way, I think some people assume that, by not giving our son either my surname or my wife’s, we were aiming a criticism at people who pass on their last names.

I would like to assure these people that we most certainly were not.

I think he’ll lose his money.

I can’t work out, however, why he would think it’s not a joke, when it seems so obvious that it is. Does this reflect differences between British and American senses of humour? Is Jerry Coyne simply rather humourless? Or does he know lots of people who can’t tell the difference between common wild animals and cats? Maybe he’s simply forgetting that badgers are much more common and familiar in the UK than they are in the US.

A pham mae pobl yn dyfalbarhau i feddwl bod yr hawl i fynegi barn yn meddwl yr hawl i fynegi barn heb gael eich herio ynglŷn â’r barn hwnnw? Weithiau mae rhywun fel Galileo yn sefyll fyny ac yn herio’r consensws, ac yn cael eu camdrin—er mai nhw sy’n gywir, nid y consensws. Ond yn amlach, y pobl sy’n darlunio’u hunain fel hereticiaid sydd yn anghywir. Sut y gallwn ni wahaniaethu rhyngddynt? Y rhai sy’n talu mwy o sylw i dystiolaeth ac yn gwybod sut i’w deall yw’r rhai i ddilyn. Weithiau maen nhw’n gwneud camgymeriadau, ond mae’r rhai sy’n anwybyddu’r tystiolaeth yn gwneud llawer mwy.

Ond mae pawb yn gwneud camgymeriad weithiau. Ac mae’n well i’r pobl sydd o blaid y consensws beidio â gweiddi “heretic” yn rhy groch chwaith…

On the other hand, I have two native languages, and I like to use both when I can (for example, I speak English to my wife, who only knows a little Welsh, and Welsh to my son, who knows even less of either language). I also think that Welsh speakers who don’t want their language to die have a certain duty to use it.

For this reason, I’ll try in the future to write more posts in Welsh, particularly if they’re especially relevant to Wales, or to my son. Or perhaps also when I just happen to feel like it. When these posts are relevant to non-Welsh-speaking readers, I’ll try to provide an English translation. Where they’re not (as here), I won’t bother.

I think that’s fair.

———

Er gwaethaf teitl y blog hwn, dwi’n ysgrifennu bron i bob cofnod yn Saesneg yn lle’r Gymraeg. Mae amryw o resymau am hyn: Mae’r rhan fwyaf o bobl dwi’n nabod yn siarad Saesneg; dwi heb fyw yng Nghymru am dros degawd (ac felly dwi’n gwneud y rhan fwyaf o bethau trwy gyfrwng Saesneg); ac dwi eisiau cyrraedd cynulleidfa eang.

Ar y llaw arall, mae gennyf ddwy famiaith, ac dwi’n hoffi defnyddio y ddwy ohonynt pan y gallaf (er enghraifft, dwi’n siarad Saesneg i’m gwraig, sydd ond yn deall mymryn o’r Gymraeg, a Chymraeg i’m mab, sydd yn deall llai fyth o’r ddwy iaith). Dwi hefyd o’r barn bod rhywfaint o ddyletswydd ar siaradwyr Cymraeg sydd ddim eisiau i’w iaith farw i’w defnyddio.

Oherwydd hyn i gyd, mi wna i ymdrech yn y dyfodol i ysgrifennu mwy o gofnodion yn Gymraeg, yn enwedig os ydynt yn arbennig o berthnasol i Gymru, neu i’m mab i. Neu efallai hefyd pam dwi’n teimlo fel gwneud. Pan fydd y cofnodion hyn yn berthnasol i ddarllenwyr di-Gymraeg, mi geisia i ddarparu traddodiad Saesneg. Pan fydden nhw ddim (fel yn yr achos hwn), ni thraffertha i’n hun.

Dwi’n meddwl bod hynny’n deg.

If you call for help, he won’t save the day,
He’s too young to understand what you’re trying to convey
And his attempts at rescue would go fast astray.
He’s Iorwerth, Iorwerth, Iorwerth Rowan.

He’s only small, but he’s rapidly growin’
And the amount that he eats is already showin’.
He’s so healthy that he’s glowin’.
He’s Iorwerth, Iorwerth, Iorwerth Rowan.

For a baby he’s really quite easy-goin’
He’ll let you take him out if it’s cold and it’s blowin’
And he’ll brave it even if it’s snowin’!

Master of the fart and the unexpected pee
His command of bowel movements is uncanny.
How come they come so suddenly? Don’t ask me!
Ask Iorwerth, Iorwerth, Iorwerth Rowan.

He’s also got no money owin’.
His cognitive development is second to none
And shows no signs of slowin’.
He’s Iorwerth, Iorwerth, Iorwerth Rowan.

No rhymes left now apart from crowin’…
They’d better fade us out before we get to hoein’…
Fade out, you stupid slowan.

It’s to be sung to the tune of the Arnold Rimmer Song (the last verse isn’t in the video, as they faded out in time).

Enjoy the transition to 2012!

Here they are (I’m sure you can think of more):

But other animals eat meat!
The stupidity of this should be obvious. Are other animals good moral examples suddenly? If another animal does something, is it therefore OK to do it? Have you watched how cats mate?

There’s a slightly more sophisticated version of this argument, where it’s pointed out that vegetarians are more concerned with human morality than with actually reducing animals’ suffering. If they were really concerned with the latter, the argument goes, they’d try to stop other animals eating meat too. This is a better argument, but not much. Most meat-eaters tend to agree that torturing small rodents is bad, so they don’t do it and are quick to condemn others who do so. But very few of them form vigilante groups devoted to saving mice from cats. We’ll also note in passing that stopping obligate carnivores like cats from hunting mice and eating meat is itself rather cruel (ooh, a dilemma. Why don’t our brains explode?).

What would you do if you were starving and the only available food was meat?
Well, what would you do if you were starving and the only available food was human being?

If you visit vegetarians/vegans, you have to eat vegetarian/vegan food. If they visit you, you have to make them vegetarian/vegan food!
Curiously the people who make this argument seem more tolerant of friends whose diet is restricted on cultural or religious grounds. Which is rather silly. I’d rather accommodate to life choices that are based on ethical considerations than tradition or old books. In any case, the argument’s stupid. It seems to be trying to imply that non-meat-eaters are being selfish. If anything, it’s the reverse. How many meat-eaters eat meat because they think doing so is ethically preferable to not eating it?

I don’t feel as if I’ve had a proper meal if it didn’t contain meat!
Then your diet probably isn’t very healthy. And you either have little experience of good vegetarian food (plus an impoverished imagination) or you’re very fussy. The problem is all your own.

We evolved to eat meat!
At least this is about us, not other animals. It’s still a bad argument though. We evolved to be able to eat meat. This doesn’t mean we should, or that it’s unhealthy not to. We evolved to do a lot of things we don’t do now.

I don’t understand vegetarians who eat fake meat products. Why don’t they just eat meat?!
This is a bizarrely common question. It’s also a really really stupid one. Weren’t these people paying attention? If someone thinks eating meat is wrong, then they’re right not to eat it. And if they miss the experience of eating meat, then it’s entirely reasonable for them to choose something meat-like to eat. You might as well ask, “I can’t understand people who chew nicotine gum. Why don’t they just smoke a cigarette?!” And anyway, what if you just happen to really like nicotine gum? Seitan is pretty delicious.

That’s it for now. I may think of more. Also look out for upcoming posts on stupid things vegetarians and vegans say. It turns out no one has a monopoly on saying stupid things about diet.

By Wednesday it had turned into this:

He’s called Iorwerth Rowan (/ˈjɔrwɛrθ/), or Iori for short (/ˈjɔri/). He weighed 9lb 3oz at birth and was about 22 inches long. We shall of course be bringing him up bilingual.

The question faced by people who come late to these series if, “Which should I read/watch first?” The answer is simple:

It is almost always better to enjoy the series in order of release, not in chronological order.

First, authors, publishers, directors and producers need their books and films to do well. They don’t want people to read or watch the first one to be released and feel they haven’t got enough backstory to understand the plot. In other words, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll ever find you need to read later-released books to understand earlier-released ones.

Second, while reading books in release order is unlikely to spoil your enjoyment, reading them out of release order (even if this means reading them chronologically) may well do so. Isn’t it better to watch Return of the Jedi before you know what the relationship between Darth Vader and Luke is? Isn’t it better to be presented with the mystery of the lamp-post in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe before having it explained in The Magician’s Nephew?

Sure, it doesn’t make all that much difference (my wife routinely reads book series in random orders), but it seems obvious to me that if you care about such things at all, release order is better than chronological order. Interestingly, authors and directors don’t always agree. George Lucas seems to think you should start with The Phantom Menace. C. S. Lewis apparently recommended reading The Magician’s Nephew first, but added that authors don’t always provide the best guidance.

I agree with that last point.