I knew my usual mode of transit would have to change when I moved from the Netherlands to the United States. Back home, I rode bikes, trams, and trains. Where I live now in rural Connecticut, everything is a car ride away. Public transportation is nonexistent. So I finally had to learn how to drive. Just one problem no one told me about: to get my license, I had to relinquish my name.
"Van Bakel?" A puzzled look from the Department of Motor Vehicles clerk who checked my papers. "That's your last name? Two words?" I nodded and said that because the license would be my only official American picture ID, everything had to be accurate. Especially my name. After some listless pounding on the keyboard, the clerk turned back to me with a sullen expression. "Can't do it. The computer allows just one word in that area. It's going to have to be Vanbakel from now on. No space."
Great. So now the only piece of nationally accepted identification I have misspells my name, out of "technological necessity" - or, more likely, bureaucratic laziness. Over time, my license will no doubt spawn many more documents that also misidentify me.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds all this a bit bothersome. On one hand, we immigrants don't want to be too persnickety. On the other, isn't it interesting that not everyone is called John Smith or Mary Miller? I've always liked the metaphor of America as a salad bowl, not a melting pot. But even now, the old Ellis Island mentality - where immigration officials carelessly mutilated many a family name whose spelling was unfamiliar - is alive and well. At least at the DMV.
No, it's not just the license. For a people consisting almost entirely of immigrants, Americans can be amazingly careless when it comes to spelling "foreign" names. Roughly seven out of ten letters and publications addressed to me mess up my name, even after I've spelled it out in a letter. Only last week, I received a package addressed to Van Winkle.
The manglemania is like a Colorado beetle: always multiplying and virtually unstoppable. Databases and mailing lists are big business. The spelling errors they contain spread to five, then ten, then twenty other such lists. By the time you've stomped out one error, a small army of new ones is ready to take over the identity-blurring work.
OK, so it ain't Bosnia. But many people feel their names are a crucial piece of who they are. In a country that prides itself on being a bastion of individualism, I'd like to claim the privilege to keep something as individual as my name.
- Rogier van Bakel (rogier@li.com) is a Dutch-born journalist who writes for European and American magazines.
