Nicknames

After writing my last post, I began thinking about nicknames. In my grandfather's family, every brother or sister had a nickname that the family, and in fact all of the town people called them. My Grandpa's name was Oliver, so the entire town called him Twist. It has always been interesting to me that every sibling in that family had a nickname.

I talked in my last post about how we nicknamed our new car "the blueberry". It's amazing how fast we become accustomed to nicknames, and begin to use them on a regular basis. We have other nicknames that our family uses to describe our house.

We have a "Harry Potter" cupboard under our stairs. When we first moved here, we began storing food in that cupboard. Eventually we even put in shelving so that we could more optimally use that space. The only problem is that the mice in the neighborhood soon learned that we had food in that cupboard and began coming in and getting in to things such as pasta that we had stored there. We got a cat, and the mice quickly decided to stay out of our house. But even to this day, in our family,the cupboard under that stairs is called "the mouse closet".

We have two family living spaces in our house. One is meant to be a more formal space, and the other has a fireplace. When we first moved in to the house, I quickly found that I was having trouble helping my kids distinguish between which room I was talking about. I began to call the more formal room the "living room", and the other room the "family room".

I wrote a long time ago that I would like to name my house. For some reason we have never been able to come up with a name for our house. The car and the cupboard were easy to name, but our house needs something a little more grand in my opinion. Maybe we need a second house so that we are forced to choose a name in order to distinguish between them.

My husband has a talent for coming up with funny names, and our family picks up on them. Our family buys hardware supplies at the "Home Despot", housewares at "VoldeMart", and watches "SMASH" on television.

At several times in my life people tried to give me a nickname, but rarely has any stuck. One boss faithfully called me "Delirious", and I think he actually finally forgot my real name. Some people tried to call me DD, but only one person I know has ever called me that consistently. I think I like it that way, I think I'll save nicknames for my house and car.