Letters to the editor
Posted on October 1, 2007

Are hyphenated names really practical?

I agree with Cox’s sentiment that name-change decisions after marriage are a personal choice. As a mathematician I would like to point out that there is an inherent selfishness to that path.

While in the first generation this is a very nice solution to the problem, after just two generations of hyphenating, last names would have four sub-names (like “Smith-Frank-Jones-Jacobs”). After three generations, eight sub-names. After four generations, 16! And 20 generations would result in people that had over one million sub-names in their hyphenated last name!

Laura Taalman
associate professor of mathematics

America is not an ambulance

I was really struck by Jeff Genota’s article in Thursday’s issue of The Breeze. His piece reads like he believes the United States has an obligation to serve as the world’s police force — which it doesn’t. We have seen the disastrous consequences that have occurred when it has tried to do just that.

Fifty years ago, Charles de Gaulle was politically tearing Europe apart, not unifying it. Look at today and it’s obvious that the issues the EU is facing — the lack of an EU constitution, immigration, ethnic and religious tensions, and so forth — show us that there are not “harmonious relations between European states.”

Yes, the issues that the world faces on the domestic and international levels are daunting. But when all is said and done, the nations of the world, and the EU, are going to have to fix themselves, and it is not the job of the United States to lead them to unification.

Elizabeth Bill
senior, political science