Comment by elorm
3 days ago
Ha I'm surprised no one mentioned one of the most common name maltreatment complaints. The Gaelic patronymic prefix Mc/Mac.
When treating Mc/Mac names, the first letter after the prefix is always capitalised.. e.g McDonald's, McCarthy, McCain, McCoy, McConnell etc but you're more likely to see mcdonalds, mccoy, mcconnell.
Orthographic case preservation reports were like the biggest complaints that no one was interested in fixing during a short stint in the airline industry.
That and hyphenated names.
My surname is Macdonald—some ancestor generations ago decided to use the lowercase d. When I lived in the US it took considerable coaching to get humans not to write McDonald, and some just couldn't get it.
I then moved to Scotland, where exactly zero people have defaulted to Mc instead of Mac. However, the computer systems of both the NHS and the University of Edinburgh apparently don't store the case of strings and reconstruct the capitalization after the fact. Both systems list me as MacDonald and there's nothing I can do about it.
I'm relatively okay with this—before computers McDonald, MacDonald, Macdonald, and M'Donald were all functionally equivalent. But now I do worry about the implications of having official documents with variant spellings