all my life my parents have called me ‘bugley,’ which i was told referred to the fact that in all pictures of me up until the age of five i have red eyes. red eyes=bug eyes…made enough sense to me. even my lower lip got the name ‘the bugley lip’ (it is fairly large, and can extend when i frown). so, the other day, my mom got a little soused and told me the real origin of my name. turns out that ‘bugley’ is short for ‘butt ugly,’ which is what my dad thought i was when i was younger. i have a ‘butt ugly’ lip. my whole family has used this nickname for me, including my gandma. they’ve all been calling me ‘butt ugly’. so, hopefully one of you has a similarly f’ed-up story, so i can laugh at your misfortune and forget about my own. please share!
Condolences, Bugley–er, I mean, Amati. My nicknames, or the ones I know about, have been more mundane. I hesitate to say this, but as a little bitty boy, I was called “Bubba,” to distinguish me from my father, whose first name I share. But when I was 6 I put my little foot down and said I would no longer answer to it. Then I had a couple of boring nicknames in elementary school, not worth mentioning.
In my twenties, I was a firefighter for a few years, and some of the other guys saw me reading the christian Bible at work. Since the loftiest reading material at most fire stations is either “Penthouse” or “Hazardous Material Disposal,” that earned me the nickname “Preacher” for a while. This is hilarious to me, because I now see the Bible as a poorly written, horribly translated, arbitrarily edited, haphazardly compiled collection of stories about a mythological character with a bad personality. Preacher, indeed.