First name if I’m introducing myself, initials if I’m signing something or I’m talking to one of my graduated debaters.
I’ve always gone by my first name.
My sister had a hyphenated first name like Beck, and no middle name. Early in her life she dropped the second half of the hyphenated name, and everyone except the government knew her by the first half. In the rare situations in which people who heard her full first name, they usually assumed it was a first and middle name.
I only know one person (to my knowledge) that goes by their middle name. A friend’s first name and last name are the same; something like Jackson Paul Jackson. He goes by his middle name so his name doesn’t sound ridiculous.
I was in a class with 2 other girls with the same first name and last initial, so we had to be JJ, Jessica and Jessi. I’ve been JJ since then, but only to people who know me through school or through school friends. The rules are very specific as to who calls me JJ and who calls me Jessica or Jess and it’s quite jarring when people call me the wrong thing (even though I am all of those things).
When my nieces figured out that a lot of people call me JJ they thought it would be fun to call me that and it was terrible. Even though my friends’ kids call me Auntie JJ. I could not handle it from my nieces who heretofore called me Auntie Jess. I never responded to JJ from them, and they finally corrected it (and I also asked them to stop). So weird, on my part, but it was a deep feeling.
I have never ever once been called by my first name except in an official documentation setting or someone reading my credit card. The US is getting better, but most forms even on line are first name, middle initial, last name.
Thank goodness, there is some improvement with a “preferred name.”
I always go by my middle name. If someone uses my middle name on a phone call or email, I’m 99% sure they have no idea who I am.
I do typically use my first initial middle name last name for signatures. It helps my first initial is also pronounced the same way as my first name. It is 100% presumed to be a female name, and I’ve yet to meet another guy with my first name.
When my trans son and others in the LGBTQIA+ community tell me “you don’t know what it’s like to be misgendered.” I reply “totally empathize, since my first name is widely expected to be a female name, and I’ve been misgendered for 60+ years.” I learned how to fight young, but have been a bit better about dealing with it the past few decades. It still sucks to work in a global 100 company, and have a manager tease me about having a girls name. It’s a total dick move. Not as bad a deliberately misgendering or using the birth name of a trans person (BTW, if you accidently use a trans person’s birth name, apologize quickly, correct yourself, move on and it’s no big deal. Heck, my son’s name, gender and referring to him as “my son” has become natural after the first few hundred times.
)
I go by Beck. Sometimes Becky. Only My Daddy used my whole name or beckdawrek. One other has given me a nick of my first name. I find it sweet.
My nieces and nephews call me Aunt Beck. We had a visitor kid once whose had an Uncle Beck. For awhile I was called that as a joke.
Grated on my teeth.
When Becky meant Karen the Lil’Wrekker decided it was funny to call me Becky. She’d say “Oh Becky, don’t be a Becky!”
I learn’t her better!
My name has been a trial my whole life.
Think I change it to Jane…I mean Cherry
The usual way of naming kids where I grew up (central IN) was to decide what the child would be called and then give that as the first name or usual version thereof. Think “well, we’ll call her Betty, so her name will be Elizabeth Jane Lastname.” This was so ingrained my third grade teacher had a hard time with the one guy in class (born in Texas) who went by his middle name. She asked “Joe, what’s your middle name?” “Joseph.” “No, what’s your middle name?” “Joseph. Leon is my first name.” It took a few minutes for him to explain why he went by his middle name instead of his first. To be fair to her, he was the only kid I knew from 1st to 12th grade that went by his middle name!
In 1984 I moved to south Georgia and found out going by one’s middle name was common here.
This is why I did the legal name change. I went by Middlename, but I was always okay using Firstname Middlename. What I never, ever, ever used was Firstname only, nor Firstname Middle Initial. I hated having my middle name abbreviated or eliminated to the point that I would get upset with perfectly kind strangers who were only following protocol.
Now, following the name change, I fit what they want. They win, I win.
Agree on the first point.
As to the second …
ISTM that family pressure or “tradition” to name e.g. first born child after father or grandfather or whatever was rampant in the 18th century and before. Lots of cultures did it. They may each have had a different tradition, but whatever it was, new parents followed it. Or else.
Fast forward to today. Amongst Americans at least, those ideas are somewhere between quaint and unthinkable. Certain insular communities may still retain their traditions partially, but in so doing, they’re the exception that proves the rule.
This did not come up in own life, but had wife and I been talking seriously about naming kids and something came up about “Uncle Albert has decreed our child must be named [whatever] for [reasons]”, well Uncle Albert would have been told exactly where to stuff his primitive ignorance. And the rest of whatever family tree he rode in on.
I’m going to suggest that the era you’re researching is when people were building up the gumption to fight back as individuals about rigid cultural naming conventions. Their own parents had lacked the 'nads to name them freely, but they were free enough to not use the name forced on them, and use their middle instead. Which, over a couple more generations, led to people free enough to tell Uncle Albert to go blow and now people name their children as they choose.
My soon-to-be-ex is a bit of a geneologist. A related point she’s encountered while researching is that was also the era of transition from people living in small villages in Europe changing to teeming cities both in the home country and in the USA. And to massive population growth wherever they lived.
When everybody is born, lives out their life, and dies all in a single village of 100 others, having only a handful of given names available for everyone works. It fails when they’re part of a community of 10,000. There simply need to be more names.
But back in the day, the village would have 12 men named e.g. Pedro who were all father / son / sib / cousin / uncle / nephew to each other. Somehow. Untangling that relationship reality from the spotty records of the time was one of her bigger vexations and occasional triumphs.
My mother has a very common first name so she has used her middle name her entire life.
I use my first name, but go back and forth on whether to use the full version or a shortened version. I also go back and forth on whether to ‘translate’ it when speaking a foreign language, but that’s getting off topic.
Both my parents went by their middle names. (Actually, Mom went by her third given name. She was the last kid in her family and she got three given names to appease as many relatives as possible.)
My parents called me by an abbreviation of my middle name, which I’ve always used.
It confuses people who think it’s my first name, and also because the abbreviation is normally associated with a different given name.
If someone knows me professionally by my full middle name, they often misspell the abbreviated version.
Both my middle name and last name are frequently used in Scotland. When I tried googling myself when Google was first starting up, I got lots of hits for golf courses in Scotland.
I come up in google searches now as myself, not golf courses.
So you’re now more famous than golf? Wow, color me impressed.
Excuse me if someone has mentioned this was before, but in Quebec the church required all males to have the first name Joseph and all females Marie and most used their middle name. I know someone who has always used only Robert P. including on all publications (in fact, we have a joint paper) but when he sent into the army they insisted on calling him Joseph P. I do know a woman who uses the name Marie, but that is not rhat common.
I knew another mathematician whose given (middle) name was Jean-Marie. But when applied to Princeton for grad school (this would have been in the late 40s because his actual PhD was in 1951) he got back a letter that said, Dear Miss M., Princeton does not accept women.
A friend has a cute story about that.
Her and her ex often used the full name when the kids were in trouble. At one point, the older two kids were telling the youngest, Steven (to use your example), who was 4ish at the time, what his full name was.
Steven proceeded to have a meltdown, crying and screaming “I’m NOT Franklin McGillicuddy”!!!
It took the parents a few minutes to comprehend that the poor kid thought that having “Franklin McGillicuddy” added to his name meant that he was in trouble or misbehaving!
ETA: I use my first name and prefer it over any other form of address
My father and my paternal grandfather shared the exact given names, however, my grandfather was always by his first name and my father by his middle name, presumably to avoid confusion within the family. But yes, it caused dad grief otherwise.
My parents took my middle name from my Dad’s brother, who had an unusual, long, unpronounceable Maori name (taken from a Chieftain from distant ancestry), so it was already reduced to a nickname for him to make things easier on everyone. I am more than happy to keep that hidden away and go by my first name, Paul, which is much more standard and familiar for everyone. Also impossible to turn into a nickname in itself without lengthening it.
My family called me Dick, but I very early on preferred Rich, because I had to go to school.
We had a thread on “Dick” vs. “Rich” or “Rick” as a nickname for “Richard” here, a year or two ago.
My dad (born 1933) is a Richard, who has always gone by “Dick,” which was not at all unusual for men of his generation, give or take; there are/were many “Dicks” of that older age (e.g., Dick Nixon, Dick Cheney, Dick Durbin, Dick Martin, Dick Smothers, Dick Butkus, Dick Cavett, etc.)
While “dick” as slang for “penis,” and as a perjorative term, isn’t particularly new, it seems like it must have become more widely known/used in that sense sometime in the 1950s or 1960s, as (IME) anyone younger than about 65 or 70 who was born as a “Richard” almost always goes by “Rich” or “Rick” for short now.