Updike, are you ever NOT a dick?
I spell my name (Kathi) with an i, simply because I started using the nickname when I was ten and I thought it looked “cool.” Oh well, what can you do?
My family still calls me Kathleen (always have), and most of the time, I go by “Kat” nowadays.
[QUOTE=Ceejaytee]
My name is Cathy. Generally, I have one of two problems. The first is people who insist that “Cathy” is a nickname and must be short for something else. Sure, Cathy is frequently short for Catherine, Cathleen (Katherine, Kathleen), so I don’t mind someone asking. It’s the people who insist that my name is NOT Cathy that piss me off. People have actually argued with me about it. “No one is named ‘Cathy.’ It’s always short for something else.” It’s been my name for 41 years. I’m pretty sure it’s just Cathy.
The other problem is people who don’t know me well deciding it’s okay to call me “Cath.” My family and friends call me some variant of Cath or Cat, which I rather like. But if you’ve worked with me for a week, or you just met me at a party, you don’t call me Cath. I don’t even know you!
I can sympathize. My given name is Catherine. I use that at work since it sounds more professional to me than “Cathy” which is what my friends and family call me. I once “trained” a junior high choir director to call me Cathy by ignoring him when he said “Catherine.” I had a supervisor who thought she had permission to call me “Cath” which I found tiresome. Only one person calls me that, and since we shared the room-mate from h*ll, she’s entitled. No one else is. As for spelling Catherine, I collect variants. I’m currently up to 11 variants, including a couple of language shifts. I gave up being sensitive about spelling years ago. But calling me “Kate” is right out. I refuse to answer to that, as it is neither my given name, nor my chosen nickname.
I was going to reply to brownie55, but y’all have done it perfectly for me.
Are you paying attention? My OP had nothing at all to do with people’s reaction to the spelling of my name. It had everything to do with them calling me by the wrong name. Nobody in the meat world has ever mocked the spelling of my name, at least not to my face.
For the record, I went by Richard until I was about 13-14. Against my will, I spent three years of junior high school listening to dick dick dick dick dick dick dick from damn near everybody. I was a social misfit with very very few friends. I also suffered from a severe lack of self-confidence that was further exacerbated by the steady barrage of verbal abuse from my classmates. You know what? When these school shootings started happening I was as horrified as everybody else. But there was a small part in the back of my brain that was congratulating those kids. I knew exactly how they felt and how they could be pushed to do what they did. I just never went as far over the edge as they did.
My decision to start calling myself Rick was an (admittedly lame) attempt to make myself seem “cooler”. While it did nothing to improve my standing in the eyes of my peers, it did wonders for my own self-confidence. At least in my own mind, I was now cooler because Rick was a cooler name than Richard.
That small boost in my own self-confidence showed. I no longer walked around the school looking like a target - or at least I became a smaller target - and as a result the teasing and bullying tapered off. That made me happy, and that showed too. I started making friends, because other kids weren’t afraid to be seen talking to me any more.
My family moved to a new town the summer before my senior year in high school. The move provided me with a clean break from my past. There would be nobody at my new school who knew I used to be a candidate for Most Likely to Go Apeshit. I marked this change in my life by changing the way I spelled my name. I adopted a spelling that would stand out from the crowd, where before I would have done everything possible to hide in the background. While my new attitude and outlook were purely mental, the spelling of my name was a physical representation of those mental adjustments. It was a tangible reminder of the way I used to be and the way I now chose to be. Spelling my name R-I-K is the emblem of my efforts to banish my fear.
And you have the audacity to call it an affectation. Well, phooey on you.
I was Rick for four years and then Rik for eighteen more years without anybody ever calling me Ricky or making fun of my name in any other way. To suddenly, in the last four years or so, have this spate of people (there have been several more besides those mentioned in my OP) calling me Ricky is extremely disturbing to me. I’ve never quite figured out my drummer doing it. He didn’t call our guitarist “Marky”. Strangely enough, the people doing it have all been several years older than me. Old enough that you’d think they’d be beyond this sort of shit.
Fuck you, asshole. :mad:
– Eric, who has a few old college freinds who like to shorten his name.
and who isn’t really pissed
Oh please, how does this fall into the category of being a dick? An (almost) 40-year old man calls himself Rk, with a dot to imply the i. I think it’s silly, and I said as much. So what? (Not that it matters, but I wasn’t the only one.)
I don’t know you from Adam, but are you always that over-sensitive? Jeez.
I get this all the time. My given name is a dimunitive of a couple of fairly old-fashioned names, so many assume one of those is my “real” name. Nope, wrong.
Worse, my first name has a soft g sound (as in Angie), yet an astonishing number of people have a great-aunt or some relative who spelled her name like mine, but pronounced it with a hard g sound (as in Peggy). I swear, every other person I meet had a great-grandmother or something with my name, and nobody ever agrees on how it’s pronounced.
And to my co-worker who insists on leaving off the “e” on the end of my first name… I’m not a Playboy Bunny named Bambi or Kitti or Candi. Stop, please. I realize my given name is cutesy as a dimunitive, but you really don’t need to harp on it. Use the final “e,” as I sign all of my e-mails that way. Thank you, and if you don’t start doing so, I will address my e-mails to you to “Stevarino! Stevie! Steveador! Stevie-stevie-beenie-weenie!”
My mom always called me by a dimunitive of my middle name (unless I was in deep trouble, in which case I heard First Middle Last). When I started grad school, I started to tell my first professor that I went by my middle name instead of my first name. A guy sitting next to me told me that I should go by my first name, because it was more professional sounding. I thought it was a great idea! I’d always liked my first name, one reason being that at the time I’d never met anyone who had the same name. Since I was in a new school in a new city, it wasn’t hard to make the change. So now I can tell how long someone has know me by how they address me - if they call me by my first name, they met me after 1984.
It did cause Mr. SCL a few strange looks - I would call the hospital ward where he worked and say “this is his wife FirstName”, and he talked about his wife “MiddleName”.
It’s not silly, it’s a signature. Have you ever paid attention to a lot of peoples’ signatures? I have-sometimes all you get is an illegible squiggle.
Names never cease to fascinate me.
First off, Rik is a perfectly good name. It’s a variant spelling, people. Get a grip :rolleyes:
I have a cousin named Rick who, to this day, will give people the Death Ray Eye if they call him “Ricky”. That includes immediate family and relatives. Trust me.
My husband’s siblings are sticklers for the “No Nickname” front. Most of their children have very traditional names like Katherine and Thomas. Those are their names, they do not have variants, don’t even try, especially in front of the sibs or, worse, my in-laws. Some have names which are only pronounced a certain way. If Mr. Kiz and I ever have children, rest assured that we’ll break from the tradition 
As a kid I never liked either my full name or nickname because of the “cutesy” factor. I tried changing the nickname as a teenager, but it never stuck. Same as an adult. Oh, well, live and learn shrug
I am in wholehearted agreement with the OP… people should be called the name they wish to go by out of respect. Anything other than their wishes being met on this issue isn’t their problem, but whoever is intentionally being rude. 
That said, my situation is similar, although different in the department that it favors the cutesie diminutive version. It goes something like this…
[ Normal spelling retained for simplicity and because I don’t give a fuck if folks get that right or not. Hell, that’s just one of the screwed up things about it and it’s not like anyone would know anyway, at least not without being told. So as long as they don’t do the inconceivable after being warned, traditionally is acceptable. Blah, blah. ]
[ol]
[li]Mother (awfool) is Kim.[/li][li]I’m born Kimberly.[/li][li]Entire family calls me Kimmy.[/li][li]Since I worship at awfool’s throne as a mere spawn, I wish to go by the same thing as she does and do… at school, church, with friends, etc.[/li][li]As I began to get older (read: before junior high), I decide to want to be called this permanently across the board because I was becoming a TEENAGER and that needed to be reflected in something more mature.[/li][li]Hell would have frozen over before awfool would have complied.[/li][li]Therefore, since I had no say in how my life was lived for me (to my 12 year old mind, that is), I could then rebel via… spelling! 
:D[/li][li]And this wonderful idea helped me to be somewhat unique to the rest of the world (which would ultimately be the most important part, right?) by going by Kimi. Yes, I know how that looks. Because it’s sounded that way even longer. ;)[/li][li]Now, it became my mantra that your name didn’t have to fit anyone else’s preconceived notions about adulthood. Kimberly could be just a childish at 45 as a toddler and Kimi easily can hold rank when she’s 17 with a pseudo Donald Trump.[/li][li]Moral is… stick it to the Name Man any chance you can!![/li][/ol]
Best wishes to Rik from the almost 40 Kemi (who, incidently, has done peace signs over the “I” 
)
Just to add another dimension to this thread, what about people who change their names at whim?
I (was) in close acquaintance with a person who I came to know by her birth name, who then changed it according to the credo of a religious cult she joined. I finally got the hang of calling her by the new name and then she dropped the cult and reverted to her original name.
A couple of years after THAT, she chose her middle name as her new address, but I was still confused and accidently called her by her religious name…when she berated me, I tried her old name and got damned for that too!!
Why the hell can’t people just live with the names they are given??
Ever heard of handwriting evolving over time? I didn’t start out not writing the I, it gradually disappeaerd on its own. It was actually gone for some time before I even noticed it. When I tried to consciously put it back in there, I found myself feeling somewhat foolish for having to stop and fumble with writing my own name. The letter R is missing from my last name when I sign it. That certainly wasn’t intentional either - it makes my name look really funny. But I don’t worry about it, because it still looks better than having a weird scribble where I tried to correct the error.
May I ask a question out of curiosity?
What made you decide to go for Rick (originally, I mean) rather than Rich? Rich is a cool name.
Note: I’m not going to call you Rich or anything, just curious. In my opinion, if you say your name is Rik and that’s what you want to be called… that’s your name. I’ll never understand people who like to change others’ names against their will. And if I met you and I heard some people calling you Ricky and others calling you Rick, I’d ask you which you prefer and stick with it. (I always do this. Once I wound up with a boyfriend I called “Bill”. Everyone else called him “Billy”. I think everyone thought I was being that girlfriend who never uses a nickname. And I didn’t find out until after another boyfriend nicknamed “Snake” died that he preferred to be called “Andrew”, because when I asked him, he said he didn’t care. I found out from another ex of his. Oops, sorry Andrew. Hehe.)
I have lots of issues with names.
My own, for example. I’ve given up on using the long version of the name, because I finally got tired of being mad at everyone for shortening it.
Mr. Kiminy is a junior, and goes by his middle name to reduce confusion with his father. But even then, it’s a short version of his middle name, and my mother (who insists on shortening MY name) is the only one who uses his full middle name.
Our 14yo daughter has changed her name at least four times now. She only allows her close friends (not family) to use her current preferred nickname, but after having to learn three names for her already, I’m not in a rush to change.
I teach college, and one of the first things I tell my students is that they MUST tell me how they want to be addressed. For the first few days of the class, all I have is the roster given to me by the registrar’s office, and unless they tell me otherwise, I will learn the name that is listed there. Many students don’t tell me that they actually go by a completely different name until after midterm–by which point I’ve engrained the “wrong” name in my brain, and will probably never change. Other students say that they don’t care, so I try to use the name on the roster instead of shortening it. This quarter, though, I have one student who is listed as “Thomas” on the roster, but he told me the first day of class that he goes by “Joe”. Okay, fine. I don’t have a problem with that. Both my husband and daughter have used their middle name at some point in their life. But WHY does he write only “Thomas” on the work that he submits??? I only have 15 people in the class, and only one person with his last name, so it’s not that likely I wouldn’t be able to match his name in my gradebook (where I actually entered “Joe” because he told me to). At this point, I’m likely to start calling him Thomas, since I find that 99% of the people I know write down the name that they preferred to be called on homework pages, and that’s the name he wants me to see when I hand it back to him.
It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally, people will get the great idea that they should call me Jordy (name’s Jordan). The intense evil stare I give them accompianied by an immediate “don’t ever call me that” usually makes sure it doesn’t happen again. (though, this being the SDMB, I expect to be called Jordy at least 3 times in this thread).
Wouldn’t dream of it Geordie.
Nope. Jordan it is and will be. Especially after having once encountered at a party a smarmy asshole Jordan who thought he’d impress the chicks by calling himself “Jordache”. :rolleyes:
There’s also the fact that the OP specifically referred the professional situations.
In personal situations I would say you do need to give people a little leeway. Adding a lilting sound for a name, such as the “-y” sound, is a near-reflexive term of endearment for a lot of people. Some assholes might be trying to get a rise out of you but I suspect for most people it’s an honest, almost unconscious thing. My name is of course Rick, and I get called Ricky from time to time. To be honest I don’t really give a shit, but even then I can tell most people don’t really notice they’re doing it.
But there’s really no excuse in a professional setting. It’s wildly unprofessional to call someone by the wrong name.
He probably meant “Jordass.”
It would certainly fit.