Made of thin air, full of desire

[sovay]

I wish I had not been given a nickname in elementary school by people who meant it to hurt.¹

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.

Comments

[bugsybanana.livejournal.com]

Were I to ever meet you, I'd have mispronounced your name the way everyone else does. (I'm here via papersky's poem post.) FWIW, the originator of the Austrian branch was an Irish count. Also, in Brooklyn, where I live, there is a street called Taaffe Place, named for a local Ireland-born monsignor, and I've always heard it pronounced Taffy Place.

I also get my names mispronounced often. My last name has an ñ in Spanish which I usually omit, but people still mangle it in several ways, particularly by leaving one n out or the other, so I'm careful when spelling it to pause before each n so both are clearly heard. What bugs me more, though, is getting called ChristinA. This happens surprisingly often. It's ChristinE, and I always specify it's with a CH.

[sovay]

(I'm here via papersky's poem post.)

Pleased to meet you! Thank you for commenting.

FWIW, the originator of the Austrian branch was an Irish count.

I spent some time in grad school tracking the Taaffes from Ireland through Austria—I had access to the Beinecke, which contained the Carlingford Papers among other relevant manuscripts. One of my father's brothers was doing genealogical work on the Taaffes in America around the same time. Their father had styled himself in direct descent from the Austrian Taaffes, which turned out to be . . . not so much the case.

(I can track on LJ when I first started looking into the subject, actually: I want to rewrite every line in this post except for maybe the definite articles, but here's the first mention of Theobald Taaffe, after whom one of our cats is partly named. Five years later, the Irish diaspora aspect was still interesting me.)

Also, in Brooklyn, where I live, there is a street called Taaffe Place, named for a local Ireland-born monsignor, and I've always heard it pronounced Taffy Place.

That's very cool! I didn't know that. It looks like it's not very far from some places in Brooklyn where the other side of my family grew up.

My last name has an ñ in Spanish which I usually omit, but people still mangle it in several ways, particularly by leaving one n out or the other, so I'm careful when spelling it to pause before each n so both are clearly heard.

My mother's first name is technically pronounced with a rolled r, but she's left it out for years because she discovered it registered to most American English-speakers as an n by analogy with the closest-sounding name.

It's ChristinE, and I always specify it's with a CH.

I can see all of the ways in which that could go wrong being very annoying.