In elementary school when I received my final report card on the last day of school each year, my teacher's name for the next year was written at the bottom of the sheet of paper. Every year on the final day, my mum picked me up and walked me to meet my future teacher. One of the primary reasons for this introduction was so I could tell the teacher, in no uncertain terms, that I only answered to my full name and my presumed nickname was off the table. I was strangely militant about this issue for such a quiet and well-behaved kid. Looking back, I'm sure that each of my elementary school teachers spent the summer before I joined them in class rolling their eyes when they thought of me. Luckily I won them all over. Well, except for my second grade teacher. I will still never understand how she didn't like me. I mean, I cried my eyes out when kindergarten and first grade ended because I loved Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Bickford so much and didn't want to move on. Second grade was a real slap in the face. Luckily Mrs. Glidden was amazing in third grade. When I had my tonsils and adenoids out, she sent me a glass bowl that contained a rose floating in water. It was the classiest thing I had ever seen.
Okay, that diversion is over. The point is this-- when I meet people or hear from people and they go straight to the nickname, which I am totally fine with these days, it weirds me out. I have never in my life introduced myself as anything other than my full name and all of my work correspondence includes my full name. Yet people feel free to shorten it. And so this morning, when I opened an email from a stranger that greeted me with a shortened version of my name, my immediate reaction was, "YOU DON'T KNOW ME!" I realized right away that my indignation was not appropriate for the situation. And then I blogged about it.
I feel your pain. That used to happen to me a lot (though not, I notice, since we moved to the US). I have never, ever, not even once, introduced myself or given my name in a shortened form. And yet quite often people who didn't know (at work, for instance) and even people who did (who should know better) would address me as Si. Which irritates living piss out of me. It's not that I love my first name (I don't like it and never have) but I hate it being shortened to something even worse. The only time I ever embraced it was on our private IRC channel when I spelled it "sigh" to indicate my irritation.
ReplyDeleteAlso, you may be mildly gratified to learn that I agonised over whether I should address you with your full name on Facebook, since I'd never seen you shorten it yourself, and was terrified you would react as above :-)
Ha, I swear I don't mind my nickname these days, and I totally understand that people who know me may introduce me to others with the shortened name. But for some reason it fries me when total strangers go straight to the nickname. Probably some residual nuttiness from my earlier years.
ReplyDeletePS, I think you dodged a bullet because "Si" strikes me as a nickname that isn't very known/used in the US-- maybe because your full name is less prevalent here than in the UK.
ReplyDeleteI'm in full-on Sammy mode. I can understand not enjoying Sam due to its masculine nature, but Sammy isn't bad.
ReplyDeleteI have absolutely no problem with either of those-- if I know the person.
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