Even before Megan and I got engaged, we decided that if we were ever so foolish as to marry, we would each change our last name to some name that was neither my family name nor hers. There were a few reasons for this. One of them was that we both felt that changing just her name to mine was more explicitly patriarchal than either of us felt comfortable with. Another was that we felt that if either of us was going to have to go to the legal trouble of changing our name, we should both suffer through it. Perhaps most important, however, was our mutual desire to choose a name for our new partnership; thus we would symbolize that we were an entity unto ourselves, as well as a part of each of our families.

So we kicked around various possibilities. Perhaps the most esthetically pleasing idea was that we use a name that appeared in both our family trees; we could find none. Perhaps the goofiest idea was to construct an anagrammatic last name by taking letters from both our last names, but we didn't come up with anything that satisfied both of us.

Eventually we settled on O'Madadhain. This is the original form of the Irish Gaelic name (as Megan puts it, the "un-Americanized" version) that eventually became the names Madigan, Madain, and Madden. By choosing this name we felt that we were capturing something in each of our heritages without making the association with my family too strong. We also liked making a stronger connection to the roots of our families than choosing a more conventional modern name would have done. (We may also have been influenced by the resurgent popularity of Irish, Gaelic, and Celtic culture in recent years.)

There are several correct ways of pronouncing "O'Madadhain", because there is some regional variation within Ireland of the pronunciation of Irish Gaelic. The pronunciations that we use most often are

• "O Mada-ahn" (the 'dh' is entirely silent)
• "O Mada-dthahwn" (what I represent as 'dth' is technically an International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) 'Delta', and is pronounced like a 'd' with your tongue between your teeth--sort of a cross between 'd' and 'th'; 'ahwn' is meant to be a cross between 'ah' and 'ow'.
• "O Madadahn" (easiest for most people to handle, if perhaps less strictly accurate than the others)

A last note: In case you're curious, I don't yet know whether I will be changing my email address to reflect my new name. There are two problems with using "O'Madadhain" in place of "jmadden": (1) it's too long for the UNIX systems that are the norm in academia (which enforce an 8 letter limit) and (2) there's no really satisfactory solution for what to do with the apostrophe, which is also verboten in an email address. [shrug]