My granddaughter calls her paternal grandfather YaYa. No one knows where that came from.
Other family nicknames:
My MIL’s family calls her Chick because when she was a little thing, a baby chick bit her and she smashed it. This is so unlike her - she took in a baby squirrel and nursed it back to health, and she’s such a sucker for animals, but her reaction when barely out of toddlerhood was to fight back…
She has a brother who was called Mutt, as in Mutt and Jeff, because he and a friend were inseparable as kids.
My mom’s nickname is also Chick, for a less violent reason - it’s the last syllable of her maiden name, which is Polish and a bit of a mouthful to pronounce. OK, not exactly in keeping with my original question, since it is related to her name.
When I did the Cotswold Way Challenge (hike all 100+ miles of the hilly Cotswold Way in England in 4 days), I was one of the few foreigners on the challenge, and as I was from Florida, they called me Florida. It’s an unusual nickname but I guess it makes sense, as here in America, it would make sense but mostly for someone from Texas and provided you also append their name (Like “texas joe”.) It would also work well for the two syllable states of Utah and Vermont, although I’ve never heard anyone nicknamed “Utah Dave” or “Vermont Sue”.
This phenomenon also made me understand the nicknames of the Three Caballeros, which I only know from the Epcot ride. They are Pancho Pistoles, Donald Duck, and Jose Carioca. I had to look up what Carioca meant, and at first it was puzzling, because “Carioca” means someone from Rio, and something like “Joe Los Angeles” doesn’t gel with the other names. But then I realized, that it would sound right to have them be, for an American equivalent, Pancho Pistoles, Donald Duck, and Texas Steve.
In 7th grade I took a French class. We had to pick French names. I wanted my name in French, but just before they got to me, someone else picked that. I basically picked a name at random. It was a variation of Peter.
Friends called me Peter. I didn’t like it. Finally I gave up and accepted the name.
So then they called me Peter Pan,.
Eventually that was shortened to Pan.
So, my nickname was Pan.
I had a group of friends in college who would just call me “Joph” but that was because I was using Jophiel on the university IRC channel where we met. But it doesn’t really count in my opinion as it was self-applied.
I knew a guy in college who I spontaneously decided looked like a “Spence” (no relation to his real name) and started calling him that. I must have been right in my assessment because soon all our other friends were calling him Spence and then, I heard, even his high school friends unrelated to the college group were calling him that. A few years after I left, I heard that he was still going by Spence and got himself a SPENCE license plate. Pretty funny in retrospect for a random decision made while playing Street Fighter II in the dorm lobby.
My parents will still sometimes call me snookie, but it’s sort of a generic term for family members of my generation.
My grandfather was Gabby, so I was Little Gabby on that side of the family. My parents will sometimes reference it, but don’t actually call me Little Gabby.
My dad was an Oneida sales rep for many years. One of his customers used to call him “Spoons”, and it kind of stuck. He even had “Spoons” as a vanity plate on his car for a while.
As for me, yeah “Shoeless”, bestowed on me by a teammate on a company softball team in the late 80s (about the time “Field of Dreams” came out).
One of my nicknames is Art. It’s a bit unusual for a female. But I got an internship at a newspaper art department, mocking up ads. My desk was next to one of the two phones in the department. One evening (it was a late afternoon/evening job), when I answered the phone with “Art Department”, my friend at the other end queried, “Is this Art?” And so, I became Art.
I’m jealous. I really wanted to be “T-Bone” at work…
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I never really had a nickname. So, at my local tavern, I’ve been just plain ol’ Digby for decades. Then we got a new bartender who brought a half-dozen new customers (his Millennial chums) along. Including a Digby half my age.
So now he’s Digs Junior and I’m Digs Senior. Or sometimes Young and Old Digs.
If he tells his date that I’m the uncle he was named after, I’m pretty good at playing along.
My dad called me Boonie. Not sure why. My grandma called me Cupcake because I always asked her to make chocolate cupcakes when I was at her house - which was almost daily.
My uncle nicknamed all three of his kids. The oldest, Carol, became Abby. The middle child, Fred, also his namesake, was known as Gimpy and the youngest, Pat was nicknamed Gaffert. We have no idea where these came from, but the first cousins still call them that.
A guy I had a crush on in high school nicknamed me Dilbert right after that comic strip first came out.
My username is Mrs_Ducky because I am married to Ducky.
I got my first construction job back in 1992 with a firm that had done a Major remodel on my Dad and Stepmom’s farmhouse in VT (nepotism, it works). They were affectionately known as Auntie Anxious and Uncle Anxious, so I of course became Cousin Anxious which became Cuz, which is still in use now whenever I (infrequently) talk to one of the guys…
Not me personally - my “family nickname” is based on my middle name (a family surname), but spelled in such a way that nobody, outside my immediate family, EVER spelled it right. That’s the one solid thing the nuns did for me in grade school: refusing to call me by that.
On the other hand, my mother stuck a friend’s kid with a nickname - I forget the details of the story, but the family name he was given (Cholmondely Throatwarbler-Mangrove the Third, or something else equally fancy) would have led to some confusion, as grandpa (the Second) was still very much in the picture. Mom told the friend “He looks like…” (where the name was something basic like, say, Bob). And “Bob” he became.
Similarly, my nephew. They’d decided to name him something (not quite as bad as the kid-who-was-named-Bob), but on an ultrasound, one parent or the other said “That looks like Xx”. Where XX is similarly average-sounding. That was 17 years ago and he still goes by that name.
Way back in time past, I worked outdoors with a large, 6’ 8", fellow who had hair everywhere. His shirt bulged with his body hair & the sleeves with his arm hair. He also wore size 15 boots & weighed in at 300 lbs. Of course we called him Bigfoot.
At another job I worked closely with a fellow that had a hard to pronounce name. He was barrel chested & short, so he was called Round Man.
Yeah, one of my bosses decades ago had the first name Boverianda. He always was known as Raghu. It was a name he had from childhood and easier to say than Boverianda.
I’ve never had a nickname that was based on my actual name. An Italian coworker called me Francesca because there was an old story (poem) about Paolo and Francesca. My name was a variation of Paolo.
I got the nickname Potsie because my last name is that of the Happy Days character. Members of the Puppet Band on Pee-wee’s Playhouse sometimes addressed the titular character as “P-man”, thus my user name.