MINNEAPOLIS -- Before Allison Brummel and Mike Mueller tied the knot, they knew they would not follow social naming conventions. She would not take his last name, nor would they hyphenate and double-barrel it.
"We wanted something clear, something short and something everyone could pronounce," said Allison, recalling the couple's criteria at the time.
They got creative, but they still hewed to something borrowed. Taking the letters from their last names, they used an anagram generator to spit out some new possibilities. After chuckling over some mashups — "El Rumbler" or "Bull Lemur" — they landed on a new surname that they thought had a nice ring to it: Bell.
