Names we are known by

In the office I am invariably called Sir Jerry. Elsewhere I answer to a variety of names. My wife calls me Jerms. Friends alternately call me Jer or Bay. To cousins I am Titi and to Henry Uy I am Lolo. I am Mr. Tunz to Michelle So, Mr. T to Rosemarie Borromeo, and to Maddie, Jerryo.

 I always find it interesting how one and the same person can be called by a variety of names, especially names that come unbidden, as opposed to those that people are given at birth, as well as the official ones required on official documents.

 I am bringing up this matter of names because I am reminded of a minor dilemma we had at the office on the night the former Libyan strongman was killed. The dilemma involved what name to use for the ex-dictator.

 As the whole world knows, the name of the former leader comes in a variety of spellings. There are as many spellings of his name Gaddafi, Gadhafi, Khadafi, Kadhafi, Qaddafi, Qaddafy as there are news organizations that report about him.

 My final instructions were to use the spelling that the Arab television network Al Jazeera uses, which is Muammar Gaddafi, for no other reason than that being an Arab station, it ought to be more authoritative on Arab names than the western networks CNN, BBC, Fox, etc.

 The sheer variety of spellings for Gaddafi’s name has given rise to a joke, bizarre under the circumstances, that while Libyan authorities have a body, they are still trying to ascertain who it was that really got killed: Gaddafi, Gadhafi, Khadafi, Qaddafi or Qaddafy.

 Aside from the names given us at birth, we go through life assuming other names. Most of these names are terms of endearment, or how people prefer to call us to our faces. What they call us behind our backs is an entirely different matter and is not a subject of this article.

 Many of the names we get called, or call others within a certain circle of closeness, are born from a play on words. For instance, I call my wife Ner. Her name is Arlene. As a crossword and scrabble nut, I once reworded her name to Anerle. Now it is simply Ner.

 My eldest daughter is Carmel Jamaica. Outside the family she prefers to be called Jam. But I call her Ker, from Kermal, my phonetic rearrangement of Carmel. My youngest daughter, Nina Fatima, calls her Weewill. We never ventured to find out why. My wife calls Nina Bogak Shegak.

 My second daughter is Lia Lourdes. Everybody in the house except Carmel calls her Ondet. Carmel prefers to call her Hayo. Most others mistakenly call her Leah. As you can see, all my daughters have second names after the Blessed Virgin Mary from some of her apparitions. 

 Some names become so common that people often mistake them for real names. This can become a problem in the newsroom when reporters do not bother to find out the real names behind the Dodongs, the Boys, and the Titings that they mention in their stories.

 It can also become a problem when a name sounds plausible enough as it is that there seems to be no need anymore to verify. One time in the office, we ran a story involving a certain Joe Billy. As it turned out, the subject’s name was actually Jubilee.

 Another time a reporter filed a story that got the names of two cardinals mixed into Jaime Cardinal Vidal. I passed the story around for good-natured banter that I eventually forgot to make the necessary correction. The name came out uncorrected, to my eternal embarrassment.

We used to have a reporter named Jovy S. Taghoy who later moved to SunStar. In her first story for that paper, she probably just put in the initials JST. I cannot speak for SunStar, but its editors probably had one person in mind. Jovy’s first story was bylined: Jerry S. Tundag.