If your birth certificate officially recorded your name as “Mary Grace,” what should you be called for short? “MG” like the sports car? “Gracia” or “Grace,” like the one said before meals? “Maria” or “Mary” might be the most obvious choice, right?
Wrong.
“She will answer to the name of ‘The Hail,’” said the father, a.k.a. my brother. Ewww, I thought. My poor niece would be stuck with a name out of her father’s wacky imagination.
But my brother was resolute. He said that the nickname was the real, honest greeting behind her formal name and therefore was essential to keep up. Just think: “The Hail Mary, full of grace...” At least that was his argument.
Surprisingly, my niece grew up taking to her nickname easily — faster, even, than her real name. Sometimes, a curious person would ask where the name came from and my brother would jump with glee because he had found another pair of virgin ears (no pun intended) to spin his tale about.
Another niece was named “Alexandra” after the last Empress of Tsarist Russia. My sister loved the story of the royal house of the Romanovs and made sure that her daughter carried a sprinkling of imperial grandeur in her name. She answered to “Lani” or “Lai,” both variations of her name. My niece walked with a confident gait, almost regal, and was never afraid to speak her mind. Did the name rub off on her?
I also didn’t escape my brother’s attempts at branding. He called me “Borgia” simply because my real name, Leticia, rhymed with history’s Lucrezia Borgia, one of the most colorful women of the Italian Renaissance. Lucrezia had an early claim to notoriety as the illegitimate daughter of a Pope and she belonged to a family known for its political corruption, on top of her string of husbands, a mysterious murder, and sex orgies in her midst. But I have no Italian bloodline that I can brag about, save for my intuitive craze for bacci, cassata and orrechiette (homemade pasta shaped like tiny ears).
I loved, however, the fun of entering a room knowing that if my brother was there ahead of me, he’d announce my arrival with imaginary drums rolling and trumpets blaring: “Borgiaaaaa!” I would laugh so hard that I would slap my brother’s back and giggle along with the rest of the family. He was a hopeless comic.
One can also earn a nickname through an embarrassing incident. At age five, I came home from school and rushed to my father who was in his library reading a book. I propped myself on his knee and pushed a piece of lined paper in front of his eyes. “Itay,” I exclaimed. “Look! I can write my name in full!” My father clapped and hugged me tight. He looked at my paper and, winking at me, whispered, “Ah, hija, you missed the second ‘i’ in your name.” Instead of “Leticia,” I had written “Letica.” And that was how I acquired another nickname — “Tica” — which brings back happy images of my father laughing along with me over my puerile mistake.
My friend Renita also has a pretty name, but true to our Filipino habit of repeating names (Gin-gin, My-my, Ton-ton), Renita’s nickname became “Nit-nit.” In school, someone made a personalized clipboard with Nit-nit’s name written in big, bold, curling letters. Nit-nit brought this clipboard everywhere, especially when we taught catechism to public school children. One little boy stood up and, with a wrinkled brow, asked: “Teacher, shall we call you ‘Nite-nite’?” From then on, I called her “Nite2” but I had to change a similar greeting if I wanted to wish her a good night. (“Sleep tight, Nite-nite!”).
When I was pregnant with our first child, my husband kept humming Nat King Cole’s love song with the French phrase “Je vous aime beaucoup,” or in English, “I love you very much.” The song kept playing in my head even after giving birth so I had this wild idea of using Je vous as the nickname for our son. Everybody agreed except my mother.
“What is going on in your head, naming my nieto guapito (handsome grandson) Je-bo?” she asked.
“Mama,” I explained, “You pronounce it ‘Je-voo,’ not ‘Je-bo.’”
“Ah, basta ya,” she retorted. “From now on, it’s Je-bo, if you want me to remember it.”
How could I argue with my mother? We settled for Jebo and even now sing the French love song with a Cuban/Filipino accent to make it truly something special. To this day, very few people ever ask me, “By the way, what is your son’s real name?” If they do, I would have another tale to spin.
Names and nicknames: You chance upon them in a variety of ways: through shared experience with others — hilarious, embarrassing or incredible — or coined exclusively for you by your family, a tag that speaks of your personality, but most of all, a name that simply evolves over time. Each nickname becomes pure delight — something special, like the personality behind it.
P. S.: In the off chance that you don’t like your name or nickname, you could still make change: ignore anyone calling you by that name; stand up and say, calmly but firmly, you don’t like it; explain that only close friends or family use your nickname; introduce yourself by your preferred name; or, if you can’t still shake it off, call them nicknames they don’t like as well.
The last and most desperate resort is to go to court to change your name. The latter I wouldn’t advise for the simple reason that the wheels of government turn exceedingly slow in our neck of the woods. And who wants to be without a name for that long a time?