I am of a certain age and never use my full first name. Sounds pretentious to me.
An old friend recently moved back to town and has undergone the transformation from a Cathy to a Catherine. This causes no end of discomfort to me as I unfailingly call her by her old name when we occasionally encounter each other.
While she doesn’t say anything about it I can see a visible flinch at my mistake and recovery.
I’m unsure what was involved emotionally in her decision to change her name but apparently failing to do so causes some kind of unpleasantness for her.
Or do we all just take ourselves entirely too seriously?
Seems that as we become increasingly diverse and more populated and as government fails to satisfy the majority, are people experiencing a sort of need to stand out as important? As counting? (And failing, as usual, because everyone else is doing the same?)
I have one of those names that’s never really popular and never bizarre or old-fashioned, but had something of a peak about 10 years before I was born. Growing up, everybody called me by the shortened version, except at one cousin’s house because his wife had the same first name and also used the shortened version. There I was “little Catty” instead of just being Catty. Same sort of situation at my first job–I had the choice of using my full name or being perpetually known as Little Catty in a place of business. I went with CrazyCat, for reasons I think are pretty self-explanatory. By the time I went to college, I was fairly used to going by my full first name and and getting it changed to the short version with people like RA’s and professors was more hassle than it seemed worth, so I just started introducing myself as CrazyCat for the sake of simplicity.
My husband goes by his full name too, but for different reasons. He has one of those classic names that’s always moderately popular but had a surge around the time we were born, so there were an absolute buttload of them in any given class he was in, and all of them but him used some variation of the shortened form. Rather than being Doc P (to distinguish him from Doc S and Doc K), he just went by DoctorJ.
That’s not to say nobody ever calls us by shortened versions of our names. My family and friends/inlaws/close coworkers call me Catty and Cat respectively, and his close family calls him Doc sometimes. But if we don’t have some sort of close relationship, don’t go calling me by a nickname. Just don’t.
My first name is unusual. It’s pretty much from antiquity. Short versions are not attractive to the ear, IMHO. Growing up in a French Canadian environment, my full name was never a problem. It’s unusual, yes, but it’s flows well with a French accent and no one ever had issues with it. When I went to a pre-dominantly English highschool, however, it became a headache. There is a similar name, with very different origins, and English speakers assume my name is the more familiar one and that’s the one they use, regardless of the number of times they are corrected.
I really, really don’t like it when people just cast aside my name for the more familiar one. It may sound petty, but… Imagine your name is Angelica, but people keep calling you Angelina all the damn time, no matter how many times you correct them. Or your name is Roderick, but people insist on calling you Rodney. It really pisses me off to have people call me by someone else’s name! I don’t mind if you have a really hard time with it and screw it up. Props for trying! At least you are acknowledging that you heard my name and want to get it right.
So in highschool, I essentially dumbed down my name. Like choosing Ange, so I wouldn’t have to hear Angelina anymore. Post-university, I ran into an old friend and when I introduced myself to his friend as “Ange” he went :eek: :mad: He was appalled because he KNEW it was because I’d dumbed down my name. He was appalled and his mother, a woman I’d known since I was four, was appalled, saying: “MAKE people learn your name!” So that was the end of the dumbed down version.
Why can’t you just call people by what they choose to be called? Robert is a lovely name. Bob, Bobby, and even Rob are…different. If people like that, so be it, but unless people give you permission to do so, don’t shorten their name.
Jonathan, too, is a nice name.
Myself, it’s the opposite - I do go by a shortening of my name, mainly because I happen to think my real name is very beautiful but no one pronounces it right (only Indians). Just because you find out my real name (it’s on my e-mail) is not a reason to call me it, especially not after I say “Call me X”. And please don’t shorten my name even farther than it is! It’s TWO SYLLABLES and I know one person who cuts off one of them. It’s like “Anaamika” - I go by “Mika” and this dude thinks it’s funny to call me “Mik”. (All of those i’s are long i’s…like “ee”).
Only one person is allowed to call me by a nickname. That person is my other half. The rest of the world can call me what I ask them to call me.
Oh, and I am not mean about it. If you see my full name in my e-mail, and you respond with my full name, even though I sign it with the shortening, I will politely correct you once. After that if you persist in continuing with it I will always think a tiny bit less of you.
I don’t know, but the names ending in “y” sounds (Martin - Marty … Richard – Ricky … Jennifer – Jenny, etc). All sound incredibly juvenile to me, it would feel really weird to call a grown man “Ricky” at work, but Rick seems normal. Similarly, Liz does not strike me as unusual but Lizzy is childish.
My name is one syllable and can’t be shortened – if you add the “ie” to it, it actually makes it longer – and I DESPISE when people do that (my mother’s allowed).
I was Christy until I went to college, when I adopted my full name, Christine. Everyone in my family still calls me Christy, which doesn’t bother me at all. My husband has mostly switched to it as well, which is fine. I just felt like it was a diminutive, somewhat childish version, as others have said, and I might as well use my full name, which is pretty (if misdescriptive).
My name has several syllables and is probably the root of more “shortened names” than any other. But I’ve always gone by the full name. Whenever I meet some one, they very often will say “but do you go by the whole name?”, I tell them yes, and they often seem annoyed. Like it’s not normal to use your actual name. I don’t think it is pretentious at all–it’s just my name!
A friend recently introduced me to “Daniel”. He calls himself Danny. The friend said she can’t call him Danny, she doesn’t like the sound of it. Bloody cheek, if he says his name is Danny then call him that. My own name is often mispronounced, so I go by Dee, if you can say my name how I do then that’s great, but I don’t want to hear your version of it. I’ll say my name is Deirdre, but call me Dee. No it’s not like Coronation Street.
As a gay male it used to be an easy way to tell other gay men.
When I was young in from the mid 70s to early 90s, a straight man was Mike, Matt, Rich, or Jim.
Gay men were Michael, Matthew, Richard, or James.
Now this never applied to blacks. I grew up around black males and they always used their full names. I knew lots of black James but never a black man named Jim.
Of course in my day people Americanized their names.
I noticed a good number of Mexican still do this. I know a lot of Luz that insist, “call me Lucy.” Or Miguels that say “call me Mike” I have a neighbor, that introduced herself to me and she had this really long name and she looks at me and says “Oh don’t worry no one can pronounce it, call me Sue.”
I don’t really care, I always address people as they ask. Although I do still think it’s odd a 50 year old man goes by Ronnie or Jimmy or Billy.
I do think since the mid 90s it has been a trend not to shorten names. I recently had to call a guy on the phone for business, he introduced himself to me as “Dave” and I always called him “Dave” and I called him at like 8pm and a woman answers and says “Dave? Dave? Oh you want to speak to David.” Like that was some great transition
Now that I think of it, I no longer know of anyone that has had a real name like Chip or Bud or something like that.
My oldest brother is named Richard. He was called ‘Dick’ until he decided that he did not want to be called ‘Dick’. My other siblings were allowed to punch him, without retribution, if he answered to ‘Dick’.
Now we call him ‘Wretched’ instead of ‘Richard’, to annoy him.
I knew a girl whose name was Christine. People shortened it to ‘Christy’, which she hated, so her friends started calling her ‘Christ Eye’. When I knew her it had mutated again, and she was called "C. I. "
This one drives me nuts also, in regards to my Dad. Depending who he talks to he’s either Al, Big Al, Alan or Scott. It confused the heck out of me as a child because Al etc are how he’s known by work colleagues but he’s Scott everywhere else. Took me awhile until I realized he wasn’t just Scott…
My son has a name that can be shortened, but we don’t. The diminutive was my Grandfather and though a perfectly good name I prefer the full version and most people call him that but I broke up with a guy because he refused to call my son by his proper name (okay, we’d only ever gone on a couple dates and chatted more than that and he never actually met my son but he refused to call him by his proper name in conversation with me… and my son would be the FIRST person to tell you that he is not Art, he is Arthur. If my son requested it, go ahead but don’t just change his name!)
My name can’t be shortened, though as Claire I have often been changed to Clara, Clarice, Clairvoyant… It’s never bothered me because I enjoy having a nickname other than Claire Bear. When I was 16 I longed to be called Chrysalis so I could shorten it to Chrys. Yes I was weird.
It’s a matter of preference really. I try to call people by what they ask me to. We have 3 Ed’s at work though, I was amused to realize they were Edgar, Edward and… I forget the other Ed name now.
If you think my name is pretentious, blame my parents, not me.
Hello Elizabeth. I’m Elizabeth. Nice to meet you.
If only more people would just follow this simple rule. How many times have I had the following conversation:
Me: Hi, I’m Elizabeth
Them: Do you go by Liz?
Me: No, it’s Elizabeth
(What I’d like to say: No, dumbass. I don’t go by Liz. If I went by Liz, I would have introduced myself as Liz. If you weren’t such a fucking moron, you would have taken the fact that I said “Elizabeth” as a clue that I go by “Elizabeth.” Moron.)
Ugh. She must have been a Michaeler.
What, you ask, is a Michaeler?
A Michaeler is a wife or a girlfriend who insists on calling the guy by the full version of his name in spite of the fact that nobody in the world (with the possible exception of his mother) calls him anything but his nickname.
So Daves become Davids and Jeffs become Jeffreys and Joes become Josephs, and of course, Mikes become Michaels.
I named them Michaelers because I first noticed it with a few Mrs. Mikes. It really stood out because they tended to put a lot of emphasis on the last syllable, like they wanted to make sure you noticed that they were calling Mike Michael. Or Mi-KULL, as they would pronounce it.
I don’t know why they do this. Seems to be correlated with bridezilla types, though. Flutterby–My Arthur has recently decided that he kind of likes it when people call him Art. If he decides he wants to be called that, I’ll call him that. (It’s better than the shortened version bestowed on him by his parents–Arfs. I have no idea where Arfs came from!) In any case, I totally agree that it would be a huge red flag if some guy insisted on calling him by some nickname that he doesn’t like.
I just call people what they want to be called. That doesn’t mean I don’t judge. If you wish to be called “Wilfred J. Futtermutter The Third”, that’s pretentious. On the other hand, I can’t summon up a whole lot of respect for a grown man who goes around being “Skippy”.
