I don’t know if this counts as a nickname. A jerk in high school, in an effort to make fun of my physical coordination (or lack thereof), used to slur my name whenever he would address me. He would fold his arms to his chest in that cruel way people do when they’re imitating a person with cerebral palsy and shout out my name, all loud and crazy-like. For some strange reason, he would add a “-y” to the end of my name so that he could stretch it out.
Sometimes when people cutefy my name by adding a “-y” to it, I have flashbacks of the embarrassment that guy put me through.
I got tagged with “Wilma!” for a big part of high school, not because of any obvious appearance, but rather because when I raised my voice to yell at track practice, I apparently sounded like Fred Flintstone.
Anyway, the other shotputters started saying “Wilma!” kind of as a greeting, not as a nickname, but the other dickheads, who didn’t know the story behind it, took it to be some kind of feminine nickname (for a 6’1" 250 lb shotputter!) and started calling me it.
It took a few punches & headlocks to slow that nickname down a lot…
There was a girl in 5th grade the other kids called “Stinky Mary Helen” and her name was MH and she did stink. Her family was migrant poor, her clothes were the same ones all week and she did smell unwashed. I never spoke to her and she seemed to feel this was a friendly overture on my part. My all-knowing mom had told me if I participated in name-calling at school, she would make sure I would wish I had never been born, and to remember that Mom’s real name was not mom, but Mary Helen. She said I didn’t have to be friends with MH, but if she ever heard I was one of the gang of kids that stood around sneering at that poor girl, she, Mom, would know about it.
Years and years later, all grown up, I run into an unrecognizably clean MH who remembered me as one of the only kids at school who never was mean to her. I said I was glad to be remembered that way. She’ll never know how much I learned from her and my mom and how effective my mom’s threat was and how I used it on my own kids to good effect also.
I had to endure several years of teasing about my skin colour when I lived in a lily white area of Northern Quebec (I won’t repeat them). I haven’t had many experiences with overt racial slurs after I moved to the US as an adolescent, nor did it affect me long-term except that most of the fellow Canadians I meet are pretty proud of their Canadian heritage whereas I am ambivalent and tend to identify more with Americans. Most people would not guess that I am actually Quebecoise. This is entirely a result of the treatment my family put up with when we were living there.
Maybe I would feel differently if I had grown up somewhere like Toronto or Montreal.
My nickname was “Spacy”. What can I say? Between the ADD, dyslexia, and malapropisms that are prevalent in my life and always have been, they were just speaking the truth. :smack: I am a bit flaky.
Later on, someone stole a nickname from a character in the book “It” and applied it to me: “Trashmouth”. Once again, they were right on. I couldn’t keep my mouth shut to save my life, and often got smacked down for it. Heh.
They hurt somewhat at the time, mostly because names like “Spacy”, while they may have been true enough, made most people think I was stupid, which was not true. I went through various stages of rebelling against it and not caring. Despite handing in tests and exams and receiving 95% or higher on each one (and acing certain classes), you could still hear some kids saying things like, “Well, at least I’m not as stupid as Spacy!” It was rather discouraging.
The good nicknames came from my best friends: Peanut [Pumpkinhead] (I was the leader of my own cult), Seymour, and Rockstar. Oh, and my English teacher always called me “Lady Anastasia”. Hee. I liked that.
My mother called me fatty patty growing up, though my name isn’t patty. My mom just like to rhyme I think, she also would say time for bed fred and the like. It never hurt my feelings and still doesn’t. My husband thinks it was awful.
In school I got tagged bell-hop because it fit with my last name, Belly becuase it too fit with my last name and I was fat compared to school kid standards. The list goes on, until I got to High School and started standing up for myself. People stopped fucking with me after that. Then they just started asking to bum a cig or where to buy pot. Why it took them until I started beating people up to figure out I smoked pot was strange. I started to relieve stress from the name calling!
Sorry, friend. I was trying to be funny. See where that gets me. I should know better on a board full of people with very different senses of humor. Feel free to turn around and make fun of my name.
I didn’t have any nicknames from other kids, but my mother called me “Thunder Thighs”, which really, really hurt. I don’t get why, either. I was thin, and had great legs - which she keeps reminding me these days now that I *am *fat and the thighs are…well…thunderous. Maybe she was being ironic. It felt mean. :rolleyes:
For years, I called my son Squirt, but he’s growing out of it now that he’s nearly as tall as I am. (Not that it had anything to do with his size. He, uh, squirted his father during a diaper change. In the mouth.) I’ve been trying to remember to call him “Ky”, instead of “Kyle”. at his request, but it’s much harder than I anticipated.
The baby girl is called Baby Girl, oddly enough. Or Little Bit (homage to Spike, of course), or Grumpy Butt or Snickerdoodle or Lambypoof or any one of dozens of silly names. One hasn’t really asserted itself as her only nickname yet.
I’ve finally settled on a nick-name I like, after a couple that got used to pick on me. In elementary school I got called ‘magarine’ (which sounds similar to my real name), then ‘butter’, and finally ‘margarine-butter’. Needless to say, I didn’t care for it. One I hit high-school (and spent far less time with the kids who had been teasing me), I got dubbed Marjie since my name is difficult to pronounce, and I was meeting a lot of new people. Unfortunately, that got twisted by some into Marjie-Parjie pudding and pie…well, you know the rest. That eventually turned into just Marj, which hasn’t been made fun of.
I also got tagged ‘Superstar’ by the other girls on the softball team when I still played. I don’t really know how that one came to be, aside from being pretty sure it came from the movie. I still hate that name, but I never said anything–by that time I knew there was no point in complaining about it.
Careful! You might get the nickname Skald the Whiner.
My actual name is Askia and I have had attempted cruel nicknames thrown at me from the time I knew what “getting ranked on” meant.
If you never react to a nickname with anything other than “Man, that’s shit’s corny” it’ll never stick. I should know.
signed,
Ass-kia
Askin’ Askia
Asking Anything
Asskisser
A-skiing down the mountain
Charlie Brown
Arnold Drummond
Ass-wackbards
Good ol’ Ass
Chucky Ass
John Gotti
Freddy Krueger
Biggie A.S.K.
Black Buddha
Chubba
Art Boy
Yo, Big Man
Fats
Biscuit
Umm, I don’t know but are you being sarcastic or something? Being called n*gger isn’t that nice, you know. It’s a pity they couldn’t have picked some South-Asian centric slurs but I suppose “Paki” never really drifted over to N. America. Like I said, I’m hardly traumatised from all the racism I went through and moved to a very liberal area of the US in the early 90s, but it sucked for my family for a long time and slow down until the French cop family moved into the house in front of ours. They were very open-minded and my sister and I were good friends with their daughter…that’s about when our house being vandalised/graffited/egged/daily harassing calls stopped.
anu-la, I’m sure gabriela was being genuine in her statement. (Odd how twice she has responded to people and they took her the wrong way…)
FWIW, I’m sorry you had to go through that garbage, too. In the major cities of Canada, particularly in Ontario, there is much more of that “cultural melting pot” going on. In the rural areas of the country, like northern Quebec, not so much. And out in the country, not so much. I had never seen a black person until 1973, when a police officer and his family moved to town. And the local yahoos lured him out to an abandoned quarry and tried to kill him. With guns. For being the only negro in a white area. I don’t live there anymore, and good riddance to people who are like that (he said, while living in the South).
I had a nickname in public school. “Computer.” I was a grade further ahead than my classmates (I accelerated), and a year, sometimes two, younger. They didn’t like that. They made sure I had to deal with it. I count my blessings that nothing rhymes with my name.
Ah, okay, I wouldn’t have been upset anyway even if she had (can’t work myself up to proper messageboard fury). I wasn’t trying to make it some huge “I think all of Canada has discrimination issues tearjerker” and we were hardly lynched-just harassed. Like I said, had I grown up in one of the major Ontario cities, Vancouver or Montreal I feel I would have a much better perspective. When I moved to Montreal for undergrad I didn’t feel any discrimination whatsoever. I think it was very time and place based but seeing as I had a better experience in the States, that’s the country I’ve come to identify most with.
Sorry for misinterpreting your wordsgabriela, sometimes it’s hard to tell who is being sarcastic or not around here. Like I said, I wouldn’t have been too torn up even if you had been mocking me.
I never really got called names at school, despite being fat and having a dreadful surname. It wasn’t till my last year at primary school when a new kid started and he used to call me ‘wide load’ because of my size, but noone else ever bothered.
It’s not limited to schools though, a co-worker used to find a lot of amusement in my surname, always calling me by both names and putting a lot of emphasis on my surname and then sniggering to herself.
I don’t remember any nicknames from kids at school. I was teased due to my redhair, pale skin, and, later, braces and glasses :rolleyes: but no nicknames.
My dad, however, used to go “look! It’s the Lee sisters, ug- and home-” and think he was quite witty. My middle name is Lee and I started using it as my first name in sixth grade so I’m pretty sure he didn’t really mean in maliciously. But, it’s really not a great idea to tease a teenage girl who’s unsure about her looks like that. I still have major issues about my appearence and have had a borderline eating disorder for years…
Why it took them until I started beating people up to figure out I smoked pot was strange. I started to relieve stress from the name calling!
