Our generation must have some phobia about saying both names aloud.

This supremely useful species of noun, its fancifully derived variations spread through the continents and the centuries, is seldom heard on today’s campus; aggressively invasive strains of casualism began to alter its habitat in the 1960s, and have now made much of its former range inhospitable to it; the things must now live a dull and mostly silenced existence on Facebook pages and news channels and stacks of forms, or when speaking of President Barack Obama and other disagreeable characters.

Yet the continued life of these creatures is vital if the social environment is to have the greatest possible health. By giving both names during an introduction, you give a means of identification, a label by which you can be known with some degree of certainty; with only a first name, you might be one among millions. Consider two scenarios:

“Hey, do you know any Letters majors named Paul?”

“You mean the guy who got arrested last year when some drunk engineers pulled off his pants?”

“What? Uh, well, maybe, he’s sort of tall…”

And five minutes later you think you might be talking about the same guy, but you’re not quite sure.

As opposed to:

“Do you know Paul Pennyfeather?”

“Yeah, he’s in one of my classes. How do you know him?”

Somebody could just ask for your last name; at a first introduction, however, the time when one would most likely remember to do so, it seems nosey and impolite. Instead, one is forced to either ask someone else, wait for a few meetings and then claim to not remember it, or creepily look it up on a class roster. It can come quite easily along with contact information, but not always, and we all have crowds of distant friends and vague acquaintances, whom we would nevertheless like to recognize should we see their names printed on a piece of paper somewhere.

And why, in most normal social situations, would you deliberately withhold your surname in the first place from anyone who isn’t plainly unpleasant? What madness was it that reversed generations of tradition, making us think we need more knowledge and familiarity before we can be on a last-names basis with our friends, and forgetting the divine counsel to let the last be first?

Two seconds is all it usually takes, five or 10 if it needs to be spelled, and the population of stalkers and serial killers is still quite low enough that an unwelcome friend request is the worst that can reasonably be expected. Accordingly, the authority of Miss Manners tells us that our behavior is really quite rude, and also displays “something sillier — a sign of eschewing grown-up manners.”

If you are genuinely anxious, consider on the other hand the benefits that can come from greater name recognition. The more you spread your entire name, the greater the chance that a future interviewer could happen to remember you from an English class, which would hopefully be a good thing.

And these days, to serenely give everybody you meet your last name is a bit odd, perhaps even memorable, but not in any bad way, so doing so will help you even more today than in the past. Not to say that every Jehovah’s Witness who comes to the door needs to know our last name, but you get the idea.

There was a certain comic character from about a hundred years ago who added a silent “p” to his name to become “Psmith,” and did quite well off of it, becoming among the best known of his author’s inventions; our strange struggle to remain unreachable and semi-anonymous to even those we personally meet would have struck the novelist as even more laughable.

— Gerard Keiser, linguistics and classical languages junior