Iam having doubt in my name.

India
January 17, 2010 11:40am CST
hi mylotters, my name is c.r. selvam. i do not know to enter which is my first name and last name in first name and last name field. iam facing this problem,when i fill registration form in some ptc sites.
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1 response
@owlwings (43915)
• Cambridge, England
17 Jan 10
Your 'first' name is your given name (or names) or personal name, how you are called by your friends and family, and your 'last' name is your family name. This is how business associates or the bank, for example, might address you by putting 'Mr' or 'Miss' in front of it.
• India
17 Jan 10
hi owlwings, i thank you for your response. In my family and my friends called me as selvam, iam not having family name. so, can i write selvam in first name field and leaving blank in second name field.
@owlwings (43915)
• Cambridge, England
17 Jan 10
I realise that different countries have different customs. Not too long ago in Europe there were no family names. If you wanted to identify which John or Peter you were, you added 'son of ...' (or the equivalent) or you were known by your trade or the village or town that you came from (or even by your physical peculiarities!) Slowly this became the family name or surname. The Internet, banking and so on have all been built up around Western traditions (European and American) and so you will constantly be asked for your first and last name and if you don't have a last name, you might seriously puzzle at least some systems! You may have to bow to Western 'culture' somewhat, I'm afraid! I once knew a man from South India called Christopher who was studying here. Of course, Christopher was his personal or given name and he had no surname. This caused some difficulties for us British because, here, you only call someone by their first name if you are on friendly terms and it is more respectful, if you don't know someone well, to address them as 'Mr ...'. He got around the problem by asking people to call him 'Mr Christopher'. I believe, also, that when he was required to give a first name and a last name, he simply put 'Christopher' for both. I would be interested to know what happens in your culture when there are two Selvams. How would you distinguish between the two when talking about them? Of course, it is quite common here to have two people with the same first name and for mutual friends to have to make it clear which one they are referring to. We might do this in a number of ways, actually: "David, you know, the one with red hair, told me ..." or "David Johnson is the goalkeeper. David O'Reilly plays left back." There is no set formula, of course. We might identify someone by their father's name, where they live, what they do for a living, who they work for, their height, size, hair colour, attitude ("the one who always looks like a wet weekend") or whatever. These are all the same kind of things that (quite a while ago) gave people their surnames!
@owlwings (43915)
• Cambridge, England
17 Jan 10
I wanted to ask one more question. You say that your name is C.R.Selvam. What do the intitials "C.R." stand for? Are these also names that you were given at birth and more or less randomly chosen or are they something that describes a group you belong to (as family, caste, tribe, religion and so on)? I have two given names, Andrew Francis (commonly called Christian names because they would normally be the names used in the christening ceremony held soon after birth), and these are the names that appear on my birth certificate with my father's surname as my surname. I am commonly called by my first given name but my brother, Thomas Adrian, has always been known as Adrian, for some reason (probably because the names of the rest of the family all begin with 'A'!) The surname I bear goes back as far as my great-great-great-grandfather. He came from a different part of England where the accent wasn't quite the same and, since he couldn't write, he didn't know how his name was spelled. When he arrived in London, a clerk wrote his name with an 'e' instead of an 'i' and that is how it has been ever since! That little change caused me no end of trouble in tracing our family history!