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19 April 2006
What nickname would you give yourself . . . if you could decide everyone (in "real life") would call you by a nick?
Nicknames come from without, you earn them, somehow. I once had a lover with a really ridiculous nickname that everyone knew him by. So the situation arose - there I am, crying out the equivalent of "oh doofus!" Yeah, it bothered him.
I'm happy with "taz". I (stupidly) never thought of the Tasmanian devil character when I (quickly) came up with it as a nickname (at MetaFilter sign-up), just working with my initials to come up with something connected with my real name.
The cartoon "Taz" is a negative for me, but I still like simplicity of it, and now feel pretty much more "taz" than "Teresa", which is more sultry and brunette than I am. (I do really like my name as pronounced in Greece, though - "Tereza [TehREZah]; still more sultry than me, but so lovely to hear...)
jrossi4r, my husband and I never address each by name, but by (the same) nickname... so much so that when we are forced to use each other's real name for any reason, it sounds weird and unnatural. To make it worse, our shared nickname is so goofy that it's totally embarrassing that everyone we know calls us this too, usually as a collective plural noun.
okay, I'll stop being coy, and fess up; they call us "the poopies", because we call each other "poopie". Why? Why do we call each other that? Why? I DON'T KNOW.
Some know me as Huffy, which happens to be my grandfather's nickname. (He's one of two Huff boys out of six siblings, yet he's the Huffy. Odd.) When one of my uncles heard Cinnamon call me that the first time, he did a doubletake.
With a somewhat uncommon name, you rarely get nicknames. 'Shane' used to be incredibly uncommon when I was young, except for the movie 'Shane,' which netted me some ribbing, and the book, which I actually had to read for class in school.
The cartoon "Taz" is a negative for me...
Really, it's just damn unfortunate that so much of the redneck population of the U.S. has espoused the Warner Bros character Taz the Tasmanian Devil. I've seen him on bumper stickers with Confederate flags and even tattooed holding a pool cue on the shoulder of a guy who carried a KKK card (real or fake) in his wallet. Like many things redneck, this is probably more common in the redneck-wannabe states (like the quintessential "Midwest," Ohio, and even the many parts of New Hampshire that don't remotely qualify atypical "New England.")
And then, apart from the redneck factor, you had that Taz marketing craze in the States that still lingers, with Taz t-shirts sold in kiosks in every mall across the nation.
But cartoon Taz himself, associations aside, rocks! ...one of the fave toons of my childhood.
And Teresa is a Taz distinct from the Tasmanian Devil.
Specklet, we have a friend who once tried to change his nickname to "Lunch" so that whenever someone said "Let's do lunch!" he could do the double-thumb self-point.
Awww, taz is a poopie. The mister and I go by "Hon," which either means darling or asshole depending on the inflection. "Hey, hon, can you grab me a beer," vs. "Um, HON, why the hell is there a ham under the sofa?"
I've been called Scody plenty in real life. My college/grad school-era nick (Saz) is still in use by a few friends from back then. My ex-boyfriend used to call me Boots, too, which I always got a kick out of.
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