I was reading another person’s blog* this morning about nicknames and it got me thinking about the nicknames my sisters and I had when we were young.
My nickname as a kid was Dum-Dum and I know exactly why that was my nickname. I was an alien, that’s why. Or at a minimum, an alien to my family. And aliens do things differently than other people. We need good information because we always have questions, and without good information we tend to spin our wheels guessing. Here’s an example of how I, an 8 year old alien, spun my wheels:
Dad: “Dum-Dum, go get that brown wallet in my top dresser drawer.” Should be an easy task, right? Nope! On my way to fetch the wallet I remember thinking “Please, don’t get this wrong!” I opened the top dresser drawer and there were two wallets, one a dark brown, the other a light brown. W.T.F?! Is this a set-up?!
I stand there for several moments, long enough for Dad to holler “Did you get lost?” No, I didn’t get lost, I’m trying to figure out your fucking riddle!
I had a 50-50 chance of being right but those odds were simply not good enough. I needed 100% chance of being correct. I decided to take both wallets which would provide the right odds but then the ratio of time/distance-travelled was all wrong. I would need to make, at minimum, 2 trips to the bedroom to complete the task if I took both wallets to Dad. That put me squarely in the ‘damned if you do, and damned if you don’t’ category. If I chose the wrong wallet I would be mocked. If I took both wallets I would be mocked for making two trips which was a waste of time.
I had to make a choice as to which type of mocking I would rather have; making two trips or bringing the wrong wallet? Of course, there was the slim possibility that I could choose the correct wallet and only make the one trip which would be like a bloody miracle but my luck didn’t operate that way.
I held out the wallets. He looked at me, then looked at Mom, then looked at me again and started to laugh. “I asked for a brown wallet so you bring me a brown wallet and a tan wallet.” He ruffled my stupid head. “AND…..now you have to make another trip to put the wrong wallet back in the dresser.” Ha. Ha. HA! FUCK!! The possibility that I would be mocked for both the wrong wallet AND the second trip hadn’t occurred to me!
So, there you have it. I’m an alien and, as an alien, I hadn’t understood the fuckery of human beings until that moment. The fact remains that I brought the wrong wallet not because I was Dumb, but because I hadn’t been given enough information to complete the task in the first place. Did Dad mean Really Brown or Sort Of Brown. These things matter to an alien. He may as well have wanted a red apple from the grocery store.
My older sister – who definitely isn’t an alien – was nicknamed Scrub. I have no friggin’ idea why. When I think of Scrub, I think of cleaning a nasty stain or ratty shrubs that no one wants – scrub brush. I discard the whole Scrub Brush thing because she was the apple of human eyes and she was absolutely ‘wanted’. So, did she make such a mess at some point in time that the scrubbing of said mess was memorable enough to inspire a nickname? If that’s the case, I really wish that story had made it into the family archives beside all of my horror stories.
Whatever the case, her nickname wasn’t the only one that was oddly unsupported. My younger sister was nicknamed Weiner. Once again, I have no idea why. Did she love hot dogs so much that ‘Weiner’ just made sense as a nickname? To make matters worse for her, everyone in the whole family called her Weiner all the damned time! She may even have been registered in school as Weiner.
I vividly remember when she had finally had enough and insisted that she be called Janine – her actual real name. That caused some weird issues. For quite a while we called her Wein-Imean-Janine. And once we got over the Wein part we started pronouncing her name ‘CHA-nine’! We didn’t do it on purpose, it was just the way we said Janine when we were in a hurry which we usually were. Mom became the pronunciation police so then the name became ‘CHA-Oops!I’msorry-JA-nine’. I don’t think any kid ever had to work so hard to have her name pronounced properly…and she isn’t even an alien!
I have one other sister – a non-alien. She was the product of a failed Visectomy and arrived six years after Weiner. If she ever had a nickname, I don’t remember it. Maybe Mom and Dad had gotten past all the fun of nicknames by the time she came along.
And maybe the nicknames would have been more cool if we had embraced them rather than hating them. Walkie Talkies would have been a blast.
“Weiner, come in! This is Dum-Dum! Scrub has spilled the beans!”
Which is entirely realistic because Scrub definitely did a lot of bean spilling. Weiner did too, now that I think about it, but it was probably because Scrub encouraged it. She was the favorite, after all. Well, until the baby came along, but by then she was old enough to be a dictator/babysitter/stool pigeon and she was brilliant at it. Right Weiner?
*The blogger’s name is Janet Coburn and her blog is Et Cetera, etc. Here’s a link to the article and you can poke around once you are there – it’s really worth it: https://janetcobur.wordpress.com/2016/06/05/superklutz-and-other-nicknames/