A rose is a rose....unless it's a Daisy

Yeah, when I was a kid I moved to a new school and the teacher kept calling me by another name - someone she'd taught the year before. I kept correcting her but to no avail. Pretty soon everyone in class was calling me that name and I gave up. So in my family I was known by my name and my classmates by something else. Eventually I started using that name myself, but only till about 18.

My sister Lisa wanted to be called Champagne when she was about 13 and she even wrote it in my daughter's baby book - ha ha

My youngest sister changed the spelling her name so many times we couldn't keep up. It was Karen, but she spelled it Karrin, Karonne, Carin, whatever.

My last name is British but most people would never guess. It's 9 letters long and 3 syllables. It looks phonetic to me, but nobody pronounces it right and I have to spell it all the time. I'd love to change it to something short and easy to spell but I can't be bothered to go through all the hoohaa. In our ancestry we have some lovely and easy names that I could use (Martin, Graham, Douglas, for example) but my favourite is Lydiatt but it sounds too much like Idiot!

When I was in college I always introduced myself as "Bea" and went by that name for several years. There wasn't any particular reason for it

I like my name okay but I'm hardly ever called by it. My family uses a derivitive of my real name and I typically call myself by that.

I too think a person should be called by a name they like.

Champagne?

all righty then.

I know quite a few people who go by their middle name, including my husband (who btw, is not really named wally).
In his case, it was because he disliked his first name....

When he was born, his first name was already picked out, but one of his sisters had a crush on a boy, and asked if they would give him that name as his middle name.

By the time he was 2 days old, all the girls in the family (6 of them) were calling him by the middle name, and that was all she wrote.

Good thing, because frankly his middle name sounds really dorky, but his middle name is very strong.

My mother and aunt go by their middle names, so does my ex, and my daughter. I called her by her first name for two months but it just didn't fit her, so on with her second name. I picked names you can't shorten because everyone shortens mine and I just hate it. Whine, whine, whine.

You know what name I really like?

Wendy.

I knew a nurse named Wendy who was from Scotland, and whenever I hear the name of think of her accent and how much she loved the Christmas season.

To me, it sound like the name of a happy girl.

If I was a guy, I'd want my name to be Paul. I just love that name.

Ugh, I HATE the name Wendy My son's g/f is a Wendy and she's totally into all the Tinkerbell ****. Ack.

Paul, not so bad. If my mother ever had a boy, she was going to call him Michael Paul or vice versa.

There are a lot of Paul's out there; in fact, Wendy's brother is named Paul. And her mother and aunt are Joan, and dad and uncle are John (same in my UK family). Apparently no one had an original thought 70 yrs ago.

I like Nigel and Imogen. No one else does, but I love them. And Clive

I am named after my great-grandmother, as are two of my cousins. The oldest is Jane, then Jamie, then me.

I've posted about this before somewhere ... in Grade 1 or 2 I decided I wanted to go by my middle name at school, which is mrs. hamburger's name, and which is verra German. I didn't tell the hamburgers. They found out at some parent/teacher thing as I recall.

I switched back to my legal name sometime later in Grade 2. Then when we were working on cursive in early Grade 3, the teacher changed my name to Beth since I could write capital B's, but couldn't do capital E's or L's or small z's (which ruled out Liz as an alternative). Fine by me.

description of ebeth's second name :



no wonder she wanted that name !
hbg

We purposely gave sozlet a very different middle name from her first name (first name = fairly normal; middle name = really weird) so if she didn't like her first name or if her first name didn't fit her, she could choose to use her middle name.

So far she totally fits her first name. I can see her using the middle name in high school for a while though...

(Side note -- the name is one I always liked and I used it for the protagonist of a children's story I wrote in 1995. The girl in the story is 9. I just found it and the girl [with sozlet's name] is scarily sozlet-like. [This was written five years before she was born, mind you.])

I definitely agree that people should be called what they want to be called.

Horrible true story -- a very good friend of mine (best friend for many years) has a hard-to-pronounce Iranian name. When she was first introduced to me, I just couldn't catch it. She wrote it down for me, and I repeated back what I thought it was. She nodded. I called her that for, like, four years -- through best-friendship years -- until a mutual friend told me that wasn't how it was pronounced (like, REALLY off). My friend liked what I'd come up with though and didn't think it was worth it to correct me, so in a way it became a nickname (even though spelled the same). I was mortified though and trained myself to call her by the correct pronunciation (the retraining was far more difficult than the pronunciation per se...)