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the oddest things set me off these days: "say yes to the dress" premiere, my pink chair (that i was trying to cover with a black sheet even though the chair is perfect fine pink), and my boyfriend's silly quest to figure out a nickname for me even though i rather despise nicknames. truly, my long unemployed days give me too much time to ponder and reflect my existence (and books like "play it as it lays" by joan didion surely don't encourage anything else). i'd like to dedicate this blog post to the exploration of nicknames: what they are and possibly their effect on our self-perception.

according to wikipedia, a nickname is "a descriptive name given in place of or in addition to the official name of a person, place, or thing." nicknames can be broken down into a few different categories such as: shortened names, titles or pseudonyms, and hypocoristic names (like terms of endearment or diminutives).

my parents ascribed me a nickname early in my childhood: andi. this shortened name-- or contraction-- served as an alternate to my full name; i think of it as a cuter version of "andrea." it's also harder to mispronounce. "andi" lasted a few years, but my paternal grandmother used to taunt me with a line from a childhood nursery rhyme: "andy pandy pudding pie kissed the boys and made them cry." when i was 4 or 5, kissing boys seemed like a vile activity that i did not want any part of. i boycotted "andi." in high school, a few friends tried out "drea" as a contraction, but that didn't stick either. "drea." the end. some remnants. a left over.

titles are rather short on my nickname list. past students called me several combinations of: miss johnson, mrs. johnson, ms. johnson, professor johnson, YOU. one family i babysit for calls me "miss andrea," which the mother insisted on because it creates a "clear boundary of authority." the pseudonym list is much longer:

• roadrunner: in 5th grade, my friends and i decided to form the "WB gang" or "warner bros gang" and title ourselves after WB cartoon characters. i was roadrunner. there was tweety, sylvester, and others. perhaps i resembled a roadrunner: i was a fast runner in my black suede hi-tops (i was stylin'), and i was rather slender.
• lucy dew: in 7th grade, mostly the same friends and i gave each other nicknames with a first and last name. the first name was some sort of trendy, cute girl name and the last name consisted of a kind of soda. i picked lucy after the hanson song "lucy," which i thought was a beautifully simple and sad love song. mountain dew was my favorite soda. i combined these two names to represent some aspect of my identity-- perhaps that i wanted to be a cute, longed-for sweetie.
• shandelle lynn carter and sari: when i was 14 and 15, i went through a weird, dark phase. i created a new name for myself because i could imagine a different me that was more elegant (doesn't shandelle sound pretty? it looks nice when you write it too) and flowy. "sari" was the name of a character in a christopher pike book that i no longer remember; she was a vampire. my french teacher wanted us to pick nicknames to use in french class (why? i don't remember), so i picked sari. i dotted the "i" with a star on all my papers.

in most of these cases, my nicknames were self-chosen. i was able to present someone else with a fake name, a persona, a label that perhaps better indicated my personality or how i'd like to be perceived. long after i created and abandoned these fake names, i looked up "andrea" in a baby name book, and under "name associations" for "andrea," it read: "fat." great. my ex-boyfriend also stated once that "andrea" reminded him of an annoying loud-mouth. great. no wonder i made up nicknames for myself. according to professors of communcation eimi lev and anat lewinsky from the university of haifi, israel, "nicknames are thought to reflect a person's identity better than the formal name." in my younger years and in my professional life, perhaps "andrea" just doesn't cut it.

terms of endearment-- or hypocorisitcs, basically the best word ever-- are really what ignited this reflection in the first place. we all have pet names for others, and we all have been called a hypocoristic. these are usually assigned by others and for some explicit purpose, and my list of "endearments" over the years is quite interesting. my friends have called/still call me:

• girly girl
• pudding cup
• sweets
• pumpkin pie
• andre the giant
• kiddo

they are a good combination of labels (like "girly"), terms of affection (like "sweets"), and sarcastic pokes (like "andre the giant"). these nicknames indicate that my friends view me as something pleasant and feminine (with one blatant exception). and i am.

the boys in my life also ascribe fairly diverse hypocoristics:

• poopy, poophead, poopface: brett and i certainly loved each other (as we should have after 4 years together), but i think we had an odd way of showing it. we each called each other a combination of poop + body part.
• my love: i'm pretty sure brett came up with this from the scene in "dumb and dumber" when lloyd drops off mary at the airport, reaches out his arm to her, says, "goodbye, my love..." as he runs into a car and deploys the airbag.
• babe
• sweetheart
• sunshine: apparently, i wake up happy and full of energy. apparently, this is enough to warrant a hypocoristic related to my AM-demeanor.
• lil girl: this was from the cardiologist, and it used to sort of weird me out.

all of these nicknames demonstrate how others perceived me. i think these nicknames also affected me and my own perception of how i functioned in the relationship: i was the annoying one, the loved one, the sweet one, the happy one, the young one. can my role in a relationship always be relegated to x? especially in terms of what the other is not?

my current boyfriend has been trying out different nicknames for me, which has been an interesting exercise that has revealed what he seems to like/value about me:

• baby
• snookums
• gigglesworth
• lil asian

"baby" and "lil" are diminutive nicknames (and they usually come into play when i'm being difficult, much like a child), and "snookums" functions much like "sweets" by indicating a desired pleasantry. i do giggle. and i am asian. i think he's rather fascinated with my being short. and my being asian. although i really don't like that nickname...

our nicknames indicate what we think of ourselves-- both to ourselves and others. i'm interested in the desire we each have to represent ourselves to others with nicknames as both labels and symbols. i think our nicknames do have an effect on how we perceive ourselves and our relationships with others. perhaps we're just looking for that connection.