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Made of thin air, full of desire
I wish I had not been given a nickname in elementary school by people who meant it to hurt.1
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gaudior had to listen to me talking about this the other day. It depended on a mispronunciation of my last name, which was one of the guaranteed sure-fire ways to upset me in childhood. I still don't like when it happens, nobody likes their name being mangled, but I no longer take it personally unless it is a visible act of malice, in which case I consider people who try this sort of stunt as adults hilarious. It's not like the pronunciation used by my father's family is in any way authentic to the original Welsh. But I lost my temper easily as a child. I think some of it may have been a form of social processing overload; certainly some of my other emotional reactions were not normative for my age group. I imagine the rest of it was the normal curve of learning not to fly off the handle when other people were whatever they were. Either way, it was apparently very funny for other children to watch. And I didn't like people messing around with my name. It didn't just feel mocking or belittling, it felt wrong. The concept of true names always made sense to me: the idea that to change the name is to change the thing itself. I noticed years ago that I don't share my Hebrew name widely, even though it would not be secret from anyone who ever saw my ketubah or heard me called to the bimah. I use the same name for all my social media, but I recognize it as a handle, not my actual name. I might turn my head if I heard it across a room; you could not enchant me with it. I do actually feel that my alternate male name would be mine if I wanted to use it, but its existence is strictly a feature of having been conceived at a point in history when there was no assumption of knowing a child's sex ahead of birth—my brother born four years later only ever had the one name, because my parents were told the genetics early on. My grandmother had a nickname for me which no one else has ever used. I answered to it; I understood it as affection. It was not derived from any of my names.
The easiest way to mispronounce my last name is to make it sound like a form of chewy candy or a pejorative term for the Welsh. Stick a first name on me that led naturally into that pronunciation and I blew a gasket. Otherwise I think I could have coped quite decently with being known as "Saltwater Taaffe."
1. Please note that this post is not a request for anyone to start using it seriously. I think about nicknames from time to time, because they interest me, and they were on my mind recently because of a character in Only Angels Have Wings (1939) whose proper name we never actually know, even though he's one of the film's quartet of main characters. So then I was thinking about the fact that the one nickname I attracted in elementary school was a deliberate effort to needle me and the one that really didn't stick in high school was similarly based around not letting me live something down and it would have been nice if it had worked out otherwise. I know there's a time-honored tradition of teasing tangled with affection, but I was not the right person for it. I console myself by thinking that I might have needed to be a character by Damon Runyon to make it work, anyway.
gaudior had to listen to me talking about this the other day. It depended on a mispronunciation of my last name, which was one of the guaranteed sure-fire ways to upset me in childhood. I still don't like when it happens, nobody likes their name being mangled, but I no longer take it personally unless it is a visible act of malice, in which case I consider people who try this sort of stunt as adults hilarious. It's not like the pronunciation used by my father's family is in any way authentic to the original Welsh. But I lost my temper easily as a child. I think some of it may have been a form of social processing overload; certainly some of my other emotional reactions were not normative for my age group. I imagine the rest of it was the normal curve of learning not to fly off the handle when other people were whatever they were. Either way, it was apparently very funny for other children to watch. And I didn't like people messing around with my name. It didn't just feel mocking or belittling, it felt wrong. The concept of true names always made sense to me: the idea that to change the name is to change the thing itself. I noticed years ago that I don't share my Hebrew name widely, even though it would not be secret from anyone who ever saw my ketubah or heard me called to the bimah. I use the same name for all my social media, but I recognize it as a handle, not my actual name. I might turn my head if I heard it across a room; you could not enchant me with it. I do actually feel that my alternate male name would be mine if I wanted to use it, but its existence is strictly a feature of having been conceived at a point in history when there was no assumption of knowing a child's sex ahead of birth—my brother born four years later only ever had the one name, because my parents were told the genetics early on. My grandmother had a nickname for me which no one else has ever used. I answered to it; I understood it as affection. It was not derived from any of my names.The easiest way to mispronounce my last name is to make it sound like a form of chewy candy or a pejorative term for the Welsh. Stick a first name on me that led naturally into that pronunciation and I blew a gasket. Otherwise I think I could have coped quite decently with being known as "Saltwater Taaffe."
1. Please note that this post is not a request for anyone to start using it seriously. I think about nicknames from time to time, because they interest me, and they were on my mind recently because of a character in Only Angels Have Wings (1939) whose proper name we never actually know, even though he's one of the film's quartet of main characters. So then I was thinking about the fact that the one nickname I attracted in elementary school was a deliberate effort to needle me and the one that really didn't stick in high school was similarly based around not letting me live something down and it would have been nice if it had worked out otherwise. I know there's a time-honored tradition of teasing tangled with affection, but I was not the right person for it. I console myself by thinking that I might have needed to be a character by Damon Runyon to make it work, anyway.
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Yeah, that could have been pretty nasty if I objected to it. It was a 90% male environment, and that only if you counted the admin staff, more like 95% male if you just counted the engineers, and humour could be a tad locker-room.
Oh, no problem. My dad was a proper civil engineer, but I'm the software type. I spent the first few years of my career doing Head-Up Displays, mostly for US stuff, C-17 most directly, but a lot of support on various F-16 projects, then segued over to flight controls, Boeing 777 and the Eurofighter, and finished off with some time on the Panavia Tornado's weapon system. Haven't worked in a while due to disability issues (which is a large part of the reason I call them Evil Aerospace).
I don't think he ever realised I was the originator, but it all ended up in tears. Management thought he was a bit of a blue-eyed-boy (despite being a contractor not a permie), so made him 'first among equals' on our team. He told me to do something, I explained why it was impossible, he swore at me, I walked out. Management decided to resolve the issue by transferring me to flight controls and leaving him in charge (hmmm!!!). Six months later, that team got hit with redundancies, flight controls didn't, and all the contractors were first out of the door. Terrible shame, that ;)
'If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.' Sun Tzu