What's in a nickname?
Stray thoughts on the things we call each other
I go by Cat these days but for most of my life I was Catherine. I still am to some people. It’s a fine name — pretty, even, and taken from my grandma — but I always felt a disconnected from it, like it was too sophisticated for me. If a book or movie needs to name a cold, bitchy character, chances are good they’ll reach for Catherine. It’s common enough, but people never understand me the first time I say it. And I’ve also endured my fair share of Catherine Zeta-Jones / Michael Douglas comments (always from older men, usually paired with longer than necessary eye contact). So when I got the chance to try something else on, I took it.
I didn’t know anyone in my grad program and when the roll call of my first class got to me I blurted out, Cat…with a C.1 I used it again at a new waitressing job a few days later. To friends and family, I was still Catherine. I kept these worlds separate for about a year, until a restaurant friend introduced me to a guy who would become my boyfriend, who would become my husband. That first year of dating involved a lot of puzzled looks and Did he just call you Cat? In her toast at our wedding, my sister called me Cat…therine and my friends from 2010 and before let out a smattering of applause.
There’s a funny relationship between a name and a nickname. Take my husband, for example: if he were to ask people to start calling him Benjamin instead of Ben (as he’s been known his whole life) it would feel weird, right? So which is his name and which is his nickname? When does one become the other? Which holds more weight, more power? Which is more true, more him?
Tone and context are everything. When your partner’s family or oldest friends call them by a childhood nickname or use some baffling term of endearment, you get a potent glimpse into their past. You see a sweeter, goofier, wilder version of them. When your mother uses your full name, you know you’re in trouble. I’ll never forget when I called my mom by her first name in the middle of a fight. It was a transgression almost as bad as whatever I’d done to get yelled at in the first place. Mom is technically a nickname but it’s the only one I was allowed to use then.
Nicknames are a secret handshake or a codeword into a club. They tell you a bit about how people see you and your relationship and your dynamic. They can be affectionate and tender. They can be crude and borderline offensive. They can be unique to you as an individual or mark you as part of a group, signaling insider status, intimacy, trust. They can even take on a mythic quality, establishing a person’s lore in the span of a few syllables: Stone Cold Steve Austin, Elle “The Body” Macpherson, Gandalf the White (and Gandalf the Gray), The Greek Freak.
They can be mean and insulting — there’s a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to the nicknames Trump bestows on his enemies. Worse still, they can be a simple means of differentiating. No, not that Matt, we might say, Old Matt. At an old apartment, our landlord’s cousin lived in our partially finished basement (the rent was cheap and we were broke). We called him Downstairs Dan — a moniker that differentiated him from the Dan who lived in the first floor, but also evoked something of the man’s very strange essence. A friend once worked at a restaurant with three girls named Sarah. The third of these Sarahs was known simply as Three. I can’t think about this without laughing and feeling a little sorry for her.
While mostly they come from without, we also have the ability to give them to ourselves. Pen names and stage names are socially acceptable forms of this. They allow us to put on our armor, put on a mask, and become someone different, someone bigger than ourselves. Or we do it as a form of reinvention, a way to mark a new chapter in our lives, whether it’s a new time and place or maybe just realigning public perception with who you feel you are inside. Maybe you just want to distance yourself from who named you or who you were named for or who you used to be.
Most of my nicknames have been slight variations of my actual name, with a few notable exceptions.2 My longtime family nickname is Cats (with an s, derived from Cats n Jammers…don’t worry about it) and friends have used Catty, Cathy/Cath (hated by me, which is why they like it), and Jonesy over the years. Still each of these variations carries a specific meaning. They orient me on the matrix of time and relation. It’s why it’s so jarring when someone uses the wrong one — when one of my oldest friends calls me Cat I feel like I’ve entered the uncanny valley. If anyone other than my college friends called me Cathy I feel revulsion, the love I have for those friends is the only thing that makes the name tolerable (and only just).
So why did Cat caused such a stir? Why did Cat demand an explanation? Names are powerful, we invest a lot in them. Names represent who we are, to ourselves and each other. They carry the weight of our history, personal and shared. From their perspective I was changing mine and potentially changing (or discarding) the terms of our shared past. I was bestowing a nickname upon myself — a transgression, as far as nicknames go — and doing so (to them) overnight.
I’ve been Cat long enough now that Catherine feels like an old, intimate secret. Hearing it from those friends and my family feels like being wrapped in a warm, familiar hug. But hearing it at work or from one of Ben’s friends would trip me up. So again I ask, which is the name and which is the nickname? When does one become the other?
It’s totally within your rights to ask people to call you by a certain name, but most nicknames are out of your control. They belong to other people almost more than they belong to you. You just gotta hope you like what they give you. And at least we can be thankful no one’s ever called us Meatball Ron on a national stage.
This week’s song on repeat
Every few months I get trapped listening to this 15 minute long song for days on end. My favorite lines change every time I listen.
Lord let me die with a hammer in my hand
There’d already been a Kate and a Kathryn in that first grad school class, which leads me to state, for the record, that the correct way to spell it is C-a-t-h-e-r-i-n-e, never mind its Greek roots. The other variations, of which there are many, are imposters.
The kitchen crew at a serving job called me Puss n Boots (line cooks can get away with a lot) and I was briefly teased with Harry Potter in the late 90s (I wore glasses and had a fresh scar between my eyebrows, it was unavoidable).