All families have their quirks and idiosyncrasies. One that struck me a few days ago was when my eldest daughter Julianne posted a Facebook message.
“Happy Father’s Day Podge”
I’m Podge.
Don’t ask me how or when I got this name, but our family seems to generate new ones on the fly without rhyme or reason. We tend to use them for a while to see if they stick or, better yet, annoy.
I suspect Podge was derived from Padre, which Jules (i.e. Julianne) adopted sometime around seventh or eighth grade when she first took Spanish. Jules is an obvious derivation, but she also is known as JayBaby, and Hullibeans. The latter was probably another Spanish twist where a “J” in Spanish is pronounced as an English “H”. So Julianne became Julie, which morphed into Hulli. Where the “beans” suffix came from I haven’t a clue.
After a while these mutations become too complex to track.
Alison became Adie (courtesy of Julianne when she was two years old and could not quite articulate Alison.) That stuck for a good ten years. I personally nicknamed her “Weed” which she disdains. This was due to my personal bemusement that she seemed to have a propensity for crawling and popping up underfoot in places that she shouldn't have been. I suspect I’m not the only father that does such stuff. James Lileks has written for years about his daughter “Gnat” (a pet name for Natalie). Alison decided enough was enough and insisted that everyone call her Ali, which I continue to misspell as Alie. Some friends call her “Girnis” which is her Lithuanian family middle name.
That strikes me as enormously ironic since it has taken me fifty-seven years to successfully ditch my middle name. As a child I was saddled with my middle English family name “Champney”, to disambiguate myself from my paternal grandfather, “Bob”, and my uncle “Bobby” who was killed in the South Pacific in World War II. At the time we were living with grandparents under the same household, and the name "Bobby" was understandably painful to hear.
Needless to say when we moved into an Irish Catholic town when I was eleven years old, my British upper crust moniker was something others had difficulty warming up to. By any measure “Champney” sounded elitist and by comparison makes names such as “Hollingsworth” sound Bubba grade pedestrian. The name did not make life particularly easy in the sixth grade.
“Say lovey, where’s Master Champney today?"
"Oh I suspect he's out and about yachting with T. Coddington again.".
Off to college and adulthood, I resurrected Robert, and Rob, and Robby, and Bob, and Bobby. I was happy with anything as long as I didn't have to repeat it ten times and explain or defend its origins. I might try Bert someday, just to be perverse. My girls would no doubt instantly recast me as Ernie. All these variants have had some utility. When I get a phone call, if someone asks for "Champ", I know it's an old friend or someone in the family. If someone uses "Bob" its an adult friendship or someone at work. If its "Robert" its definitely a telemarketer and I hang up immediately.
Yet the middle name still haunts me. A few weeks ago I was told that I might be terminated because Homeland Security couldn’t verify my identity with the Social Security Administration. Large companies are being asked to verify citizenship of employees, not a bad idea unless the i’s are not dotted or the t’s not crossed. The failure to verify was because my mother used my middle name when she signed us up for our Social Security numbers, so the name on my passport did not align with the name in SSA. Somehow the IRS and SSA seemed to figure all this stuff out when it came to tracking my income and collecting money. But when it comes to figuring out whether or not I'm a U.S. citizen, things broke down.
Pet names are in a league of their own. Lucy our Aussie morphed into “Loosey Goosey” which morphed into “Goose” which then morphed into “Goofer”. Titan morphed into “T” and for a while lived a life as “Frank”. Our tabby, “Sunny” morphed into “SunBall” then “Ball” and then into “Prince” and “Prince Bee”.
And we wonder why the pets don’t come when we call them by name.