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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.
no subject
x Childhood teasing around mangling and rhythmically repeating my last name making me absolutely furious. There's something about attacking a person's name that hurts like almost nothing else when we're kids. It's ironic really, because the implication was actually more about my gender than about my name. I'm kind-of interested in the fact that the other kids picked up on that when I was eight.
x Answering to a nickname from my grandfather and no one else, that had nothing to do with my given name.
x Using an online handle variously that isn't "me" but which I would probably answer to if it was said.
x Knowing the name my parents would have given me if I'd been genetically a boy and occasionally whipping my head around when that name is called.
x Having wanted a functional nickname, not just a shortening of my name because it was too difficult for summer camp counselors and etc.
Oddly, I think I have attached a lot more significance to middle names for various reasons, because my own name is just a single name and I have no secret Hebrew name. My name is just my name, Hebrew, English or French. Though I did have a French teacher who decided to give us all typical French names one year. I was Martine, which wasn't great, but at least everyone could pronounce and remember it.
Bingo!
no subject
I am reminded of my friend Shlomo, who on arriving at Brandeis was repeatedly asked what his Hebrew name was and responded dubiously, ". . . Shlomo?"
Bingo!
Hee.