Your Name

[laceandbits]

If you are in the situation of having an official name and a usually-known-by name do think if you actually need to use your official name in a lot of/most circumstances.  For example, I organise craft weekends and am amazed the number of Jennys who fill their form in as Jennifer, or even a Julie who is always known as Julie but still writes Carolyn on her form.  Confusing for me (until I knew) and confusing for the tutors and hotel.

Unless you need your name to match up with a passport or other official document, fill the form in with what you like to be known as.  Why advertise a name you don't like or use if you don't have to.

I dropped my first name with my friends when I was about 12, gradually my parents and close family got the hang of it, I got my passport and driving license without it with no problem and it is only ancient aunts who still occasionally use it. 

[AmethystAnne]

The relationships and 1st names are real, but the last names have been changed.....

I (Laura Jones) have 4 children that are now 35(Diane), 31(David&Michelle), and 25(April). Diane met her now DH(David Smith) at Michelle's wedding to Jonathan Brown (David Smith's 1st cousin).

Several years have passed since that wedding, and my 3 DD's are married and all have children.

Michelle's and April's children have 2 Uncle Davids. To distinguish between them in conversation with the little ones, they are Uncle David Jones and Uncle David Smith.

[SoCalVal]

If someone tries calling me by a nickname that I don't go by, I'm usually tempted to ignore them until they start calling me by my correct name.

My name is John Tango*. I'm not, nor have I ever been known as JT, Johnnie, or Jonathan, so if you're calling one of those names, you must be talking to someone else, right?

*Not really, but it's a convenient example.

Pod.  I learned early on (age NINE) that if I don't answer to a name I don't want to be called, the person learns not to call me that (started with my mom who kept trying to call me a nickname that resulted in mean teasing from my siblings, which is specifically why I wouldn't let her call me that).

I tell people up front who ask me if they could call me an undesirable nickname that they could but I won't answer (and if they try to call me that nickname then, sure enough, I DON'T answer).  I have no problems with obviously ignoring them (it has been the most effective way of making people stop calling me something I don't want/don't like to be called).

I use my middle name so I'm easier on people who wouldn't know I don't use my first name.  I'll correct them if it's to be an ongoing relationship.  I don't bother if it's someone I'll deal with once.

[artk2002]

Then there's my sister's friend, who, when she was 4, replied to a person who asked that her name was "dammitjulieann".  It seems that my sister's friend was quite, um, precocious  as a child.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwYVqMj5i6k

[BabylonSister]

As a teacher, there were honestly limits to what I could do/remember.  If William wanted to be called Will or Bill that worked because when I went tinto the computer to enter grades or attedence those nicknames were close enough for my brain to connect the two.  However, if he wanted to go by the nickname Alf, it just wouldn't work.  There was no obvious link and the legal name is what I am entering all my documentation under.  Maybe if I taught elementary and had a class load of 20 or even 30, but in a secondary setting where I might get 150 kids at a time, 300 or more a year It was just too difficult, at least for me.

I've seen "name by which the child usually goes" on some school registration form, especially for the smallest kids who all their lives have been used to their nicknames.




____


Re: the situation of having several members of a family with the same name:  my maternal grandfather's name was Jean.  Of his three daughters, two also married a Jean.  The sons-in-law were known as "Jean Lastname" and my grandfather as Papi.

[mmswm]

Then there's my sister's friend, who, when she was 4, replied to a person who asked that her name was "dammitjulieann".  It seems that my sister's friend was quite, um, precocious  as a child.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwYVqMj5i6k

My sister's friend has had that clip brought to her attention numerous times, sometimes along with the accusation that her mother was fibbing to her about it. Nonetheless, the story is true.  The friend is to this day something of a spit fire (and one of my favorite of my sister's friends.)

[LadyClaire]

The relationships and 1st names are real, but the last names have been changed.....

I (Laura Jones) have 4 children that are now 35(Diane), 31(David&Michelle), and 25(April). Diane met her now DH(David Smith) at Michelle's wedding to Jonathan Brown (David Smith's 1st cousin).

Several years have passed since that wedding, and my 3 DD's are married and all have children.

Michelle's and April's children have 2 Uncle Davids. To distinguish between them in conversation with the little ones, they are Uncle David Jones and Uncle David Smith.

That's why I like how things are done on my mom's side of the family. In the turkish language, there is a different name for relatives according to how they are related to you. There is no all-encompassing "Uncle". There's what literally means "mother's brother", "father's brother", "mother's brother-in-law", and so on. Same thing with aunts and grandparents. It's so much easier that way.

[AmethystAnne]

LadyClaire, that's wonderful! I'd vote that if it were possible. There are alot(!) of Walters in my family tree: Dad's brother...Mom's brother...Dad's father...GrammaH's sister's DH....my brother's middle name

Dad had an aggrieved tone in his voice when he asked/told me "why my DH didn't name our son Walter". I told him it was my idea. "Golly, Dad. 5 Walters already. We needed a new name"

[LifeOnPluto]

I have an uncommon name. If an acquaintance mispronounces my name, I politely correct them. Generally, I never have to do this more than once. If the acquaintance in question kept on mispronouncing my name, I simply stop answering to it.

The above does not apply for persons in positions of authority over me, such as bosses, teachers, etc. Call me cynical, but I don't want to antagonise them by forcing the issue. If, after a couple of attempts to politely correct them, they still persist in mispronouncing my name, I just let it go.

(I found this out the hard way, when I was 12, with a sports teacher who repeatedly mispronounced my name. After a few attempts to politely correct him, he got irritated, and said "I'll just call you by your initial from now on." And he did. While all the other kids got to me called "Jane" or "Michael" or whatever their name was, I was just called by my first initial.)

[sarahj21]

I learned the hard way not to put my middle name on assignment cover sheets at uni. Most lecturers tell you a time and their office location, and you turn up to find everyone's marked assignments in a box. One lecturer decided to call out names in class to return assignments one by one, I guess to find out who was attending lectures, although attendance has never been part of our grade.

So he's calling out names, most of them guys, because I studied engineering. Mark, Andrew, Ben, etc. And then me. "Sarah Bernard" he calls... um, it's Beatrice, a girls' name. So my friends called me Bernard for the rest of the semester. That's not the real name but you get the idea. They all knew my last name so it was very obvious that my middle name had been mispronounced. And yes, the guys still laugh about it.

[Thipu1]

I would keep correcting them until it finally got through. The opposite actually happens to me. My last name is a more common female first name than my actual  name, so I frequently get mistakenly called by my last name. From my experience, if you don't address it right away, and persistently, that person is going to keep calling you by the wrong name.

An old friend has the same problem.  Her first name is a little unusual but not weird.  Let us say that her  name is 'Shelly La Monica'.  Frequently,  people will assume her name is 'Monica Shelly'.  She's spent almost 60 years of life correcting people.  She's gotten used to it but it still irks her. 

As she puts it, 'it makes me feel like I'm being addressed by a drill sergeant'. 

[jedikaiti]

I only had this happen in elementary school when I had one teacher insist on calling by my given name instead of my nickname.  No matter how many times I asked her to "Please call me Nickname" she would use my given name.  As an 8-year-old I didn't think I would have any way to stop this habit.

I've intervened for one of my children on the opposite.  Lets say his name is Thomas.  The teacher insisted on calling him Tom.  He hates any nickname of his full name.  He would come home from school quite upset about being called Tom all day.  The kids were starting to call him Tom as well.  He was very frustrated. I called the teacher and she gave me this "oh, but it's just a nickname, he shouldn't be so sensitive" line.  I was livid.  I explained to her that he wasn't being sensitive, she was being extraordinarily disrespectful.  She then said that it was impossible to be disrespectful to a child.  I took my complaint to the Principal, who moved him to a different classroom.  Oddly, my complaint wasn't the only one, and this teacher found herself being pink-slipped at the end of that year.

Anyway, the point is, as a child, there might not be much you can do, but I feel like this is when the child's parents need to step in.

As an adult, I think I would do the "lather, rinse, repeat" in politely correcting people.  I have a friend who simply won't respond to people after they've been told of his preference two or three times.  I don't know if that's retaliatory rudeness, but it is effective.

I'm the same way about my son's name.   He's David.  Not "Dave", not "Davey", but "David".   I don't have any dislike of the nicknames, but I seem to have a mental block when it comes to associating them to my little boy. 

As a side note, my son also has an uncle with the same first name.  My poor child is going to be forever known as "Baby David".  He's currently 2, so this is OK, but I'm sure he'll hate it once he becomes a teenager.  How do you get people to quit calling you by a childhood nickname?

My Dad is the youngest of quite a few siblings, so inevitably, he was called "Baby". By age 4 or so, he got sick of it, and announced he wanted to be called another name (we'll say Silly Pants). He was called Silly Pants (or just "Silly") by family & even some friends until he went away to college, at which point he decided to reclaim his given name. To this day, however, he occasionally gets calls or letters from nieces and nephews who are old enough to have known him back when, addressed to Uncle Silly.

[Margo]

<trimming quote tree>

I use my middle name so I'm easier on people who wouldn't know I don't use my first name.  I'll correct them if it's to be an ongoing relationship.  I don't bother if it's someone I'll deal with once.

My Dad is like this. He's always been known by his middle name,  from birth (His parents chose to name him firstname midlename lastname because middlename firstname lastname would have given him a set of initials spelling a word, and they felt that that might be annoying for him.

He goes by his middle name but on forms etc, will usually write it a firstinitial middlename surname, which allows it to match up with official ID if it has to (and in his working life, this did often matter, due to the nature of the work) but it also meant that people only got the name he wished to use.

I think that except where it's likely to be a problem (such as with a Boss) simply not responding is a fine response to 'train' those who persistiently use the wrong name.

On a similar note - in my family, we always called adult relatives, on my mother's side of the family, by their given names (i.e. not 'Mum', 'Dad' 'Grannie' 'Auntie' etc.) or in some cases, by nick-names  It goes back at least 3 generations. When we were at school, my sister and I started calling our mother 'Mum', instead of using her name. She explained that she preferred to go by her name, and when we ignored that, she started calling us 'Daughter 1' and 'Daughter 2' which did the trick. We went back to using her name. (I should add that this was in speaking *to* her. There was no issue with describing her as 'my mum' to third parties, but as she explained, it's not her name, and it's only one part of who she is.)

I remember having one teacher, later on, who tried to tell me that it was disrespectful and rude of me to call my mother by her given name. I got told off for replying that I thought it was much ruder and more disrespectful to call her something she didn't want to be called.

[Piratelvr1121]

Then there's my sister's friend, who, when she was 4, replied to a person who asked that her name was "dammitjulieann".  It seems that my sister's friend was quite, um, precocious  as a child.

That reminds me of Bill Cosby's joke that his name was Jesus Christ and his brother's name was g-ddammit.  When he was in a tree his dad said g-cuss it all to tarnation, get out of that tree and he said "But Dad, I'm Jesus Christ!"  And when his friends didn't believe him that his name was Jesus Christ, he brought them home and his dad said "Jesus Christ, get these kids out of my house!"

My brother was named for our grandfather, so they were called big F and little F. 

[chacreed]

Speaking of children and teachers, when I was in primary school, we had quite a few repeated names.
We had three Carlos, two Martas and two Ivans. Most teachers didn't have any problems: the Carlos got each called by their surnames, one Marta had a middle name and the other didn't, so they were Marta Maria and Marta Surname and the Ivans were actually Ivan and Iban, so pronounced differently (or we just called Iban by his surname, since he actually got enrolled in our group later than the other)

And one year, I think I was seven or eight, we got a substitute teacher, and the name problems started... with me. Not with any of the repeated names, that would have been sort of logical.
My name is Almudena. That's it, that's my whole legal name, no middle name, no first name with Almudena second, just that. It's a very long name, so everyone called me Almu.

She called me Maria, got mad when I didn't answer to Maria, and told me to start getting used to put my full name on all my exams and homework "as you are going to need to do in high school and college"

Ok, I told her I was already doing that, I signed everyting with Almudena FirstSurname SecondSurname.

"That's not your full name! You have to put Maria de la Almudena FirstSurname SecondSurname!"

"But I'm not Maria de la Almudena, I'm just Almudena"

"You can't be! That's not a name! Since it comes from the Virgin of Almudena, it has to be Maria de la Almudena"... Repeat every day until I actually got the school secretary to show her a copy of my birth certificate, and she still had more to say. Between that and some other things, we were glad when our normal teacher came back.