“It ain't what they call you, it's what you answer to.” ~ (W.C. Fields)

Names. Our own special "labels". Husband occasionally draws my attention to names of young people in some team or school class mentioned in the local newspaper. I don't know whether it's a peculiarity of our town or an Oklahoma peculiarity, but some of the names are unusual to our eyes, unusually spelled too. Changing "C" for "K" is a common occurence (Karol, Kora, Karrie-Ann), using a surname as first name comes up frequently, which can be reasonable - or peculiar, crying out for abbreviation. Under a photograph in our local paper not long ago was a list of cheer-leader team names including: Wyatt, Micaila, Ashtyn, Kenzie, Kodee, Kiyana, Ali, Tayor, Rion, Bailey, Sydney, Chyan, Tori, Bailie, Karson, Hailey, Paige.

Names, like fashions in clothing, drop in and out of favour. A fun time for names, I thought, came just after the "love-in" hippie era of the 1960s when babies emerged called River, Leaf, Rain, Apple, Summer and suchlike. Then there'd be a swing to biblical names and many Joshuas, Sarahs, Rebeccas, Elis, Matthews, Marks etc would fill school registers.

Friends and relatives often shorten (or occasionally lengthen) the first names of their...friends and relatives. Why this became a custom is something of a mystery; maybe part laziness (can't be bothered to enunciate the full name), part wanting to appear affectionate or "one of the in-crowd" in respect of said friend or relative. Necessity for clarity is occasionally the reason for short-form names. At around age 14, in my school class, we had three Jennifers. They agreed amongst themselves that they'd be known as #1 Jen, #2 Jenny and #3 Jennifer. Mid-term yet another Jennifer joined us - if memory serves I think she agreed to be known by initials: "JP".

How shortened names such as Richard morphing to Rick came about is easy to understand, but a change to Dick not as easy. Was it due to a bit of rhyming fun, or because a few people found pronunciation of "R" difficult (as children sometimes do)? William becoming Will or Willy/Willie is obvious enough, but...Bill/Billy? Rhyming again, as Rick/Dick... Will/Bill?

I've no idea how John became Jack. My Dad was Kenneth John but nobody ever called him anything but Jack. At this point in my keyboard scribbles I went to look for an answer to the John/Jack question, found an article on this very topic of shortened names at Mentalfloss: The Origins of 10 Nicknames. I wouldn't count shortened names as true nicknames, though I realise these do come within that definition. I'd define a real nickname as something quite apart from one's given name, whether in long or short version; something perhaps related to appearance, or talent, surname or profession (or both): such as "Nobby" once often used as nickname of anyone whose surname was Clark, because clerks in the old days wrote, using pen and ink, for hours on end, causing knuckles and finger joints to become...knobby.

My mother and grandmother used to tell me that in "the bad old days" any female who had the misfortune to work as a servant to a wealthy family was often called Mary by her employers, whether that was her name or not. Marys were sometimes called Polly too (my father's mother was an example of this), possibly via the old (southern) English habit, that still survives: putting 'L' at the end of an abbreviation in place of 'R'. I noticed in an interview between John Cleese and Eric Idle, just the other day, that John Cleese referred to Eric as "El". Terry, already an abbreviation of Terence, is sometimes further adapted to Tel. So: Mary/Mol/Molly/Polly? And Dorothy/Doll/Dolly.

Online, these days, we can choose for ourselves the names we're known by - if the chosen name is not "already taken", and as long as we are willing to make it unusual enough not to be obvious to would-be impersonators. In a fantasy future, either dystopic or utopic, I can imagine the restrictions we now find in choosing online screen names applied in real life - a population where no two people can bear the same first name, and where census takers are faced with recording individuals as Janetx742*/0, Berniee00*017, etc. Census takers, over their morning vitamin and mineral shakes, would tell each other tales of golden "olden days" when people had "real" names like John and William and Mary and Ann.