processing middle names correctly is my middle name

The Tears Of The Giraffe post reminded me of a thing I mentioned on Twitter a while back: the difficulty of accurately categorising (in terms of alphabetical sorting) people whose authorial name is in three bits, like, for instance, Alexander McCall Smith, or, for that matter, Iain Duncan Smith, who actually is - no, seriously - a published novelist. 

question for everyone who files their books in alphabetical order of author's surname, i.e. everyone who isn't LITERALLY insane: how are we filing people with two non-hyphenated surnames? currently fretting about Michael Marshall Smith - under M or S? #books

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) January 2, 2020

Even in that tweet I have made an unwarranted assumption, which is that if you have someone who professionally goes by three names with no intervening hyphens, names two and three are a sort of combined surname. This is demonstrably untrue for names such as Joyce Carol Oates, double featuree on this very blog - to be fair if you read the thread under the original tweet I do acknowledge as much there. Below is a not-necessarily-exhaustive list of potentially problematic authorial names from my own bookshelves.

 

Author name	Middle bit	What is it?
Alice Thomas Ellis	Thomas	probably surname (pseudonym)
Isaac Bashevis Singer	Bashevis	probably surname (partial pseudonym)
Mario Vargas Llosa	Vargas	Spanish patronymic
John Kennedy Toole	Kennedy	middle name
Gabriel García Márquez	Garcia	Spanish patronymic
F. Scott Fitzgerald	Scott	middle name
Alexander McCall Smith	McCall	surname
Joyce Carol Oates	Carol	middle name
Lewis Grassic Gibbon	Grassic	probably surname (pseudonym)
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala	Prawer	surname
David Foster Wallace	Foster	middle name
Bobbie Ann Mason	Ann	middle name
Michael Marshall Smith	Marshall	surname
Brett Easton Ellis	Easton	middle name
M. John Harrison	John	middle name

It's important to point out that these are my best guesses based on some cursory scanning of Wikipedia pages for the authors in question and the application of what seems to me like common sense but could very possibly not be. So for Alice Thomas Ellis, for instance, there isn't much real-world context to go on, since her real name was either Ann Margaret Haycraft née Lindholm or Anna Margaret Haycraft née Lindholm, depending on whether you believe her Wikipedia page or her obituary. But since Thomas is an unlikely middle name for a woman I have chosen to assume it's meant to be the first part of a two-part surname. 

Since I am quite lazy I wanted to have a single rule I could apply to all authors, and so the only rational one seemed to be to file the books by the third part of the name. This avoids things which seem obviously wrong, like filing Joyce Carol Oates under "C", but does produce some results which are wrong the other way, like filing Gabriel García Márquez under "M" rather than "G" and Alexander McCall Smith under "S" rather than "M". But it's the best system I have.

These relatively minor problems are just a tiny microcosm of the problems that can be faced by anyone trying to categorise people's names, particularly those trying to design IT systems and databases that store and display them. This article has an excellent list of the Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong variety and this article builds on it with some real-world examples. (some more can be found here). For all that these are excellent things to remember, especially if your book collection contains anything by Colette or Voltaire, it doesn't necessarily mean that you should abandon the approach of storing "given name" and "family name" as two separate fields, as this is phenomenally useful for the vast majority of Western names, just that you need to design in enough flexibility to store what you might, in your blinkered Western-culture-centric way, consider to be "non-standard" names. 

And, I'd hope it goes without saying, while you're being all woke and accepting inputs from a gazillion different character sets, don't forget to sanitise your inputs.

grudging admiration for the "NULL" brothers and their devious plan to fox any attempt to retrieve their details from any sort of database https://t.co/shQdJCpC0j

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) October 9, 2020