• (cs)

    if (namePart.Trim().EndsWith(".")) { PronounceAsName(namePart); } else { PronounceAsRomanNumeral(namePart); }

  • (cs)

    Having handled legal documents from dozens of people using suffixes, I have to say most of you have no clue how suffixes actually work. For most people with suffixes, it is a legal part of their name. Usually, 90% of the time (when not dealing with sr. or I), it appears on their birth certificate. I have not seen an instance where someone with a suffix does not use it on every single legal document.

    As for someone dieing bumping you up a notch? That's news to one of my clients, a fifth whose origin died in the 1820s (for those of you keeping track, somewhere in that liniage one of them did not name his son after himself, but said son later named his own son after his father, his son's grandfather). It's also news to a few other clients that are fourths.

    So regardless of what "Miss Manners" says, or any other de jure definition, the de facto scheme seems to be any time you knowingly name a child after another person with the exact same name (first, middle, and last), you add one to the suffix and produce the full name, which is then the permanent legal name for that child.

    It seems to me that the "senior dies, everyone moves up a notch" is just a fantasy that some junior had: "When my dad dies, no one else will share my name! Mwa ha ha ha!" which he then extrapolated: "so now I'm the only one with my name (mwa ha) so I am the first! Mwa ha ha ha", which has then infected some people in the ignorant masses.

  • Bo, the ancient mainframer (unregistered) in reply to Mr Cranky
    Mr Cranky:
    Only to Germans.

    Nope - goes for at least one language other than German, my native Danish.

  • Charles (unregistered) in reply to Tom Woolf
    Tom Woolf:
    I think this may be one big coincidence, and that it remains an odd error and not yet and explainable wtf...
    Perhaps the f_name field was "Suzanne M."?

    Suppose the programmer had already thought of the kings of Sweden, etc, only to be defeated by bad data entry!

  • Longhorn (unregistered)

    The voicemail system at my work does the same thing. My boss's middle intial is L. And so, periodically I get a message from "Edward the 50th". He's actually in his 50's, so I don't think he likes this joke, given that it's coming from a young whipper-snapper.

  • RG (unregistered) in reply to jtl

    oh, come on. That's not a bug. Thats a developer with a good sense of humor!

  • RG (unregistered) in reply to Owen
    Owen:
    rick:
    Owen:
    Could be worse, she could be MILLI M Malone, (if her parentsd were alliteration fans)

    Except that the story said she was his wife. So unless they were related before getting married or highly coincidental, Malone isn't her maiden name.

    It must have been a highly coincidental coincidence. Who'd have thought!

    Do you mean to say that a couple can't continue the womans name after marriage?

  • grammernarzee (unregistered) in reply to mallard
    mallard:
    D2oris:
    Note that the period behind a number often means "-th" or "-rd". (Don't know the English name for it)

    "20. May", "5. Customer"

    It's called an ordinal. i.e. "One" is a number, "First" is an ordinal.

    To be precise, 1 is a Cardinal number, first is an Ordinal number. Mallard was looking for the word describing the bit after the number, e.g. "st", "rd", "th", which is the number suffix.

  • (cs)

    Sirs I have to say I'm disappointed. 108 (CVIII) comments and no one even mentioned Sixth Lenin. (Yeah, I edited it. At first I wrote fourth...)

  • (cs) in reply to Bo, the ancient mainframer
    Bo:
    Mr Cranky:
    Only to Germans.

    Nope - goes for at least one language other than German, my native Danish.

    Also Czech and Slovak. AFAIK French has a suffix 'e', and Spanish (?) has suffixes 'o' and 'a'. The latter two are even in the Windows "base" charset: Alt+0186 and Alt+0170 respectively.
  • (cs) in reply to Erzengel
    Erzengel:
    As for someone dieing bumping you up a notch? That's news to one of my clients, a fifth whose origin died in the 1820s (for those of you keeping track, somewhere in that liniage one of them did not name his son after himself, but said son later named his own son after his father, his son's grandfather). It's also news to a few other clients that are fourths.

    By the real rules, he doesn't have the same name as any of the others. The "origin" was "Joe Shmoe", and he's legally "Joe Shmoe V". That makes him "Joe Shmoe V Sr.", so to speak, although if he's deluded into thinking that's how it works, there won't be a junior, because he'll be putting a "VI" into his kid's name, thus creating another new name. There's nothing illegal about it, any more than naming your kid "King Joe Shmoe", but only people who are clueless about how it works would think that a boy named "King Joe Shmoe" is actually royalty.

    Erzengel:
    It seems to me that the "senior dies, everyone moves up a notch" is just a fantasy that some junior had: "When my dad dies, no one else will share my name! Mwa ha ha ha!" which he then extrapolated: "so now I'm the only one with my name (mwa ha) so I am the first! Mwa ha ha ha", which has then infected some people in the ignorant masses.

    Well, aside from the fact that the "moving up on a death" rule has centuries of precedent in England (and in American works on proper address -- there were other authorities before Judith Martin), which means that it's your client who is an infected ignorant mass, I suppose we're even: it certainly seems to me that calling yourself "IV" and your kid "V" smacks of an ingrowing inferiority complex. Like you can't imagine that your offspring might actually be worthwhile on their own. "I may be an inbred sociopath in Futtbuck, Alabama, and maybe I spend my days wishing I lived before 1860 so that there'd be people who had to respect me by law, but at least I'm a IV." Or maybe "oh, dear, the common people just don't give me the respect that Daddy's money deserves. It must be because I'm so nouveau riche. I'd best name my child after myself, so that his II-ness will shine through and impress people." Either way, it's not a positive trait.

  • brian sosmaweif (unregistered) in reply to Maurits
    Maurits:
    Three generations gets you 111 Suzanne's: 889 short. You need the better part of four generations.

    If you read it as 1 Suzanne + 10 Suzannes + 100 Suzannes, then yes. I'm reading it as 10 Suzannes + 100 Suzannes + 1000 Suzannes. The first 10 Suzannes' mother's name was Brian.

  • (cs) in reply to Michael Spencer
    Michael Spencer:
    I used to live in Apex in Wake County until a year ago... Used the library but never heard of this problem.

    TTS just pisses me off in general, unless of course it's Microsoft Sam saying "your gay!!", because that just rocks.

    Microsoft Sam should react to that with "I don't have a gay."

  • J!P (unregistered) in reply to gabba

    Like the programmers in the '70s didn't know that that was going to pose a problem; their bosses encouraged them to save expensive storage capacity when RAM was like $100k/Mb. They just didn't think their programs would last that long. On the subject of interpreting those Roman literals: the problem would have been nonexistent if the code checks for them would ignore letters with a dot(.) right behind them. That way it is supposed to be an abbreviation.

  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to John the 4294967295th Smith

    I imagine it says Suzanne, the 1000th, Malone the third...?

  • (cs) in reply to RussAu
    RussAu:
    You can see this in action on Windows XP.

    Control Panel -> Speech -> Text-to-Speech Tab

    Replace "You have selected .. as the computer's default voice." with "Suzanne M.".

    Click "Preview Voice"

    Actually, Microsoft Sam gets it right, but the other two voices I have here say "Suzanne the one thousandth." However, if I put in "Suzanne M. Smith", it reads it correctly.

    These two voices are called "LH Mike" and "LH Michelle". I have no idea where these voices came from or what LH stands for; these two voices expand the LH to something I don't understand that sounds a bit like "Learn a ton, Homsky!"

  • sprx (unregistered) in reply to default
    default:
    D2oris:
    Note that the period behind a number often means "-th" or "-rd". (Don't know the English name for it)
    It's ordinal numbers, which are used to sequenate the set, as opposed to cardinal numbers which basically denote quantity.
    D2oris:
    "20. May", "5. Customer"
    For Arabic numerals, Roman don't require dots.

    Rules, rules. Learn them, for your own sake.

    That is correct.

    Roman ordinals never have a period behind them. Not in names, not in german or any other language.

    So this is not just crazy to treat ordinals before initials, but even coded without knowing the rules on that issue.

  • Hognoxious (unregistered)
    I guess all those poor saps out there whose middle initial are I, V, L, X, C, D or M have their own inside jokes too
    I? Do you number the first one? I've never heard people refer to Queen Victoria the first.
  • brian sosmaweif (unregistered) in reply to Hognoxious

    But surely you've heard of Elizabeth I?

  • David (unregistered)

    Hmm, wonder if the well-known actress 54th Tyler uses this library...

  • e malone (unregistered)

    welcome our new malone overlords. too slashdotty?

    being a malone it's nice to see our numbers truly representes

  • F. the Ist (unregistered) in reply to Someone You Know
    Someone You Know:
    I have no idea where these voices came from or what LH stands for; these two voices expand the LH to something I don't understand that sounds a bit like "Learn a ton, Homsky!"

    It probably means and reads Lernout and Hauspie

  • widget (unregistered) in reply to gabba

    Hey, even Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan is only CLI.

  • (cs) in reply to John the 4294967295th Smith

    error?

  • Anonymous (Wannabe) Ham (unregistered) in reply to yan
    yan:
    TRWTF is the location of the .mp3 file.

    http://thedailywtf.com/images/200801/suzanne1000.mp3

    I've never seen, or even heard of, an .mp3 image.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-scan_television

  • (cs) in reply to F. the Ist
    F. the Ist:
    Someone You Know:
    I have no idea where these voices came from or what LH stands for; these two voices expand the LH to something I don't understand that sounds a bit like "Learn a ton, Homsky!"

    It probably means and reads Lernout and Hauspie

    Bingo. Now I'm just left to puzzle over how these voices from this (apparently defunct) company got on my computer here at work.

  • Jay (unregistered)

    There is a street near my former home called "Colonel Glenn Highway" (named after the astronaut). My GPS pronounces it "College Glenn Highway". More puzzling to me, it pronounces "Beavercreek" as "Bevvercreek" and refers to a certain discount store as "Whale-Mart".

    Years ago I attended Lock Haven State College. Using the Post Office's official list of abbreviations, when I submitted a change of address to the post office I wrote it "Lock Haven St Clg". I got a reply referring to it as "Lock Haven Street College". I think a "street college" is where one goes to learn hip-hop slang. But sure enough, on the post office's official list, both "State" and "Street" are abbreviated "St". Apparently their programmers missed the class on forming unique keys. I'm glad they didn't have the same person making up state abbreviations or we could have seen Massachusetts, Maine, and Maryland all mapped to MA ...

  • German (unregistered) in reply to sprx
    sprx:

    That is correct.

    Roman ordinals never have a period behind them. Not in names, not in german or any other language.

    So this is not just crazy to treat ordinals before initials, but even coded without knowing the rules on that issue.

    Wrong. In German they do have periods after the Roman ordinals.

  • bcdm (unregistered) in reply to Hognoxious

    Of course you don't. That's because there hasn't been a Queen Victoria the Second. King Richard the First (aka Richard the Lionhearted) or Queen Elizabeth the First you've probably heard of, though, since there were more Richards and Elizabeths.

  • Bulletmagnet (unregistered)

    I wonder what Lenin the Sixth or Stalin the Fourth would have thought about this...

  • PeriSoft (unregistered)

    At least her name wasn't Liv McDix.

    "Hi, I'm Liv McDix, but you can call me 54 1409."

  • (cs) in reply to MET
    MET:
    You obviously have never written software that deals with real world names. All you need is one far Eastern name to appear and all these rules are broken. Typically they have three name parts, but sometimes more e.g. "Aung Sun Suu Kyi". One of these is the 'surname' part, but which one depends on which country they are from. China, Japan and Korea (to name but three) all have their own rules, but I don't rate most people's chances of correctly matching names to country convention.

    Also don't forget the Spanish who have two surnames, one each from the mother and father. You can hyphenate them together as in the typical English convention, but they don't like it.

    Actually, I have. Where I live it's a legal obligation to have exactly one surname and at least a first name (middle names are of course optional). Now, I won't claim to be an expert on this matter, but people that actually have two surnames (e.g., wives wishing to also use their spouse's name, nobility, people with names from an odd dialect) legally still have only one (that happens to consist of multiple parts). So if your name happened to be "William Apples Oranges" where "Apples Oranges" were your two surnames, you'd be required to jot down "Apples Oranges" in the surname field.

    So, you cater for the largest group. If, say, 30% of your target audience uses different rules you'd also supply those as an alternative. You simply can't regex your way through every possible variation of legal names and/or the way people choose to spell them out ;)

  • tonecoke (unregistered)

    Had the developer only checked for roman initials at the END of the name, the solution would have been fine. I dont recall anyone being "the 3rd" (or whatever) in the middle of their name.

  • AdT (unregistered) in reply to wgh
    wgh:
    But "fixing" this will cause problems for Pope Benedict XVI. So now I'm just lost.

    We'll just call him Josef Ratzinger instead.

  • ysth (unregistered) in reply to PeriSoft
    PeriSoft:
    At least her name wasn't Liv McDix.

    "Hi, I'm Liv McDix, but you can call me 54 1409."

    I don't get it. I dialed 54 1409 on my phone and just got silence.

  • M L (unregistered) in reply to RussAu
    <quote>

    Replace "You have selected .. as the computer's default voice." with "Suzanne M.".

    Click "Preview Voice" </quote>

    ... and I hear "Suzanne (em)" What's your point?

  • Rimed Ancient Coder (unregistered) in reply to Chris

    Speaking as a dev with some prod code still running after decades, I'm surmising that the code was originally designed for names of the format: last, first <optional id> where the optional id was, as someone else noted, used for II's and III's, but not middle inits. But now the input has changed, so Suzanne M. Malone goes into the lex recognizer which reformats it for the internals (which of course never change -- too complicated) as Malone, Suzanne M, which then gets parsed out and violá -- greetings to Suzanne, the 1000th.

    As to why the programmer included "1000th" for M, it was probably a gag. I know when we wrote our first system using a synthetic voice we played for hours, making it say...well, we won't go there. Not reciting Shakespeare but it was funny at a certain level.

  • (cs) in reply to PeriSoft
    PeriSoft:
    At least her name wasn't Liv McDix.

    "Hi, I'm Liv McDix, but you can call me 54 1409."

    That doesn't work. She'll have to be Liv I. McDix.

    And I'll bet she's hot.

  • Chris Love (unregistered)

    How embarassing to see my own library on the Daily WTF!!!

  • SynthGab (unregistered)

    Hi all,

    discussing this WTF!? with my (non-IT) girl friend, she said something which could be an explanation:

    Maybe they activated this "option", which is to interpret potential roman numbers, because of book titles, e.g. "The Lord of the Ring II: the two towers".

    And maybe not...

  • Nick (unregistered)

    I swear, this makes me want to change my middle name to MMDCCXCV to see how smart it is.

  • ugandhar (unregistered) in reply to Someone You Know
    Someone You Know:
    RussAu:
    You can see this in action on Windows XP.

    Control Panel -> Speech -> Text-to-Speech Tab

    Replace "You have selected .. as the computer's default voice." with "Suzanne M.".

    Click "Preview Voice"

    Actually, Microsoft Sam gets it right, but the other two voices I have here say "Suzanne the one thousandth." However, if I put in "Suzanne M. Smith", it reads it correctly.

    These two voices are called "LH Mike" and "LH Michelle". I have no idea where these voices came from or what LH stands for; these two voices expand the LH to something I don't understand that sounds a bit like "Learn a ton, Homsky!"

  • JD (unregistered)

    Hilarious! My brother has a middle initial of M and he just played a voicemail from Macy's the other day that did the same thing...now I can tell him why.

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    "Susan, The 1000th, Malone, your book, Malcolm, The Tenth: The Unauthorized Biography, is ready for pickup."

  • Linhasxoc (unregistered)

    Oh my god, this just answered a years-old question! My library used to always to the same thing to my dad, except he was "Bob the 100th Smith" (not his real name of course). Guess what his middle initial is? We haven't had this happen in years because we don't use the library very often and when we do we get e-mail notifications instead, but back when I was in middle school I could never figure out why this would happen.

  • Another roman Numeral (unregistered)

    I've been reading through archives and felt like popping this up.

    My last name is a roman numeral when in all caps. A large company that some of my relatives work at decided that its automated "the office has blown up" call system would store last names in caps, resulting in calls for "Jill 1049".

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