Over the years, surprise surprise, people have called me one or two things. Samuel Hamilton says this of nicknames: "But you can be sure of this--whenever a human has a nickname it is a proof that the name given him was wrong." (Steinbeck, John. East of Eden. New York: Penguin Books, 1981. 301.) Maybe not wrong, but incomplete.
When CLH and I were younger and had seen "Audrey Rose" (or she had seen it as the second feature at a drive-in while I was consigned to the back of the station wagon), we decided that whoever died first would haunt the survivor, as a ghost or reincarnation or by whatever means were possible. We came up with a name for that, too, so we would know the haunting was genuine. And to this day only she and I know that name, so we can haunt each other and know it's genuine--as long as we have the power of speech.
CLH created a name for me when I was ten and she was thirteen out of the two worst things she knew of. To this day, only four other people know what it is. This is a pointless digression without the actual epithet, but I wanted to make a point of how well she names things.
We really don't know how to spell this, my beloved sister's faux-French
pronunciation of my middle name, which I have not always liked.
After the Margaret Atwood booksigning, I thought of the parallel for her. Our
mother is responsible for CLH being spelled the ditzi way. And, though I clearly
wrote on the card for Atwood CLHi with a quite
big ultimate i, Atwood signed her book "to CLHy." This pissed me
off until I decided I had a new name for my sugar-spun sister: Cin-dwy, pronounced
/aI/ according to the phonetic alphabet in The Origins and Development of
the English Language or an i with a - over it in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate
Dictionary, Tenth Edition, which isn't written for HTML. Long i, as in stile
and style, if you need that.
My personal favorite. It came up in college, though I don't remember how or when; it wasn't always meant flatteringly either. I often don't look before I leap or bounce.
My friends all raved about "The Princess Bride" when they first saw it Christmas break freshling year, so I was anxious to. The summer after sophomore year, one weekend when all the boys were out, all the girls in the house rented chick flicks, among which was "The Princess Bride." Fezzik cracks me up. When the Sicilian yells, "No more rhyming! And I mean it!" Fezzik impetuously bursts forth with "Anybody want a peanut?" And so DEDBG and I call each other "peanut."
"Lupner" or many variations thereof.
A sheltered young thing, I had not started to watch "Saturday Night Live" until late in high school and so had missed the Gilda Radner age with her character Lisa Lupner, Lisa with her startling and annoying laugh. My across-the-hall neighbors, so much older and wiser than I as juniors, called me Lupner almost from the start of my freshling year--and were shocked when I needed it translated. Lupner, Loobner, Loopy, and SEM's particular variant...
Second semester freshling year, SLH and I were in Bio for Boneheads together, that worst of Unit I requirements, the laboratory science. Aside from mocking our assigned lab partner (not always behind her back), we did not enjoy the class. One of the bits we were supposed to learn had to do with haploid or diploid genetic structure. SLH decided I was odd enough to be polyploid.
So quickly did I become an excellent driver (just slow in the driveway) that this was a short-lived nickname. NCS bestowed it upon me when I first legally drove Fugly (25 May 1989) and had not perfectly coordinated the clutch and the accelerator.
Compliments of EKH the school year we shared a phone line, when I tried to offer her half the deposit.
I don't remember what inspired HAO to say this, but she's hardly the first.
"A run-away train with a massive vocabulary"
Also courtesy EKH, in response to a long (because me) and evidently rambling (because me) letter.
Dating from September of 1991. Androgynous Kevin dubbed me this on maybe the second or third day we worked together at the UConn Co-op because, he said, he never knew what mood I'd be in, what I'd say or do, from one minute to the next. At the time, this was quite true.
"She is also a natural leader."
Absolutely killer line from a letter of recommendation. I told the writer that after reading it I had had to wrap my head up in bandages so I could fit through the door, it was so swelled. (I know the antecedent of that most recent "it" is unclear: how to clarify it without ruining the tone of the sentence?)
"Mrs. McTwitter the baby-sitter/
I think she's a little bit crazy/
She thinks the baby-sitter is supposed/
To sit upon the baby."
A Shel Silverstein poem that AAC bribed
any one of her daughters to recite at my wedding for five bucks. MAC
took it, the mercenary.
"She's like a hippy chick but with a job."
HAO's friend Scott. He is the hippy dude without one, or "just" a one at a ski resort.
An older neighbor woman called me this. I was a right porker as a tot.
My name is Lisa, not Lease; its syllables are divided thus: Li/sa, not Lis/a. Only RDC's other aunt has ever called me "Li." I like that a lot.
Who is this person? A name is in part a person's identity--why do some people think a woman's name must change when she marries? I remember a name from a Lois Duncan novelleeny (Daughters of Eve), deliberately heavy-handed, about a woman spending a summer "waiting for that moment of self-identity when she would become Mrs. George Grange."
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