Recently, I tried to register with phone company EE. When someone asks for my first name, I usually just give my initial. But this box wasn't having any of my nonsense. It demanded two characters - and no "unusual" characters.

What are unusual characters?

About 16% of the world use "Chinese" characters (it's more complicated than that).

In the UK, where I am, it is pretty normal to find people with fancy European diacritics.

It's the banality of the bigotry which gets to me. Usual. Normal. Standard. They're just dull ways for dull people with limited imaginations to dehumanise other people. The people who designed this form probably didn't think of themselves as racist. They just designed, built, or perpetuated a system which was exclusionary.

Language matters. We're a decade on from "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" - so ignorance is no excuse. And telling people that their names are abnormal is rude.

The form itself doesn't actually do a good job of validating names. It quite happily allowed me to register with my name consisting of two apostrophes.

Basically, if your form can't register Beyoncé - it has failed.