Ter[ence|ry]
FIRE meta personal · 28 comments · 500 words · Viewed ~676 times.
My name is confusing. I don't mean that people constantly misspell it, but that no-one seems to know what I'm called. Let me explain.
British parents have this weird habit of giving their children long formal names which are routinely shortened to a diminutive version. Alfred becomes Alf, Barbara becomes Babs, Christopher becomes Chris - all the way down to the Ts where Terence becomes Terry.
And so, for most of my childhood, I was Terry0 to all who knew me.
There was a brief dalliance in my teenage years where I went by Tezza. A name I have no regrets about using but, sadly, appear to have grown out of.
So I was Terry until I entered the workforce. An overzealous IT admin ignored my "preferred name" on a new-joiners' form and, in a fit of bureaucratic inflexibility, renamed me "Terence". To my surprise, I liked it. It was my nom de guerre.
"Terence" had KPIs and EOY targets. "Terry" got to play games and drink beer.
While "Terence" sat in meetings, nodded sagely, and tried to make wise interjections - "Terry" pissed about, danced like an idiot, and said silly things on stage.
Over the years, as was inevitable, my two personalities merged. I said sillier things at work and tried a quarterly review of our OKRs with my wife1.
I was Terry to friends and Terence to work colleagues. Like a fool, I crossed the streams and became friends with my colleagues. So some knew me as Terry and some as Terence. Confusion reigned.
Last year, I stopped working. I wondered what that would do to my identity. Who am I when I can't answer the question "What do you do for a living?"? But, so it seems, my identity is more fragile than I realised. When people ask my name, I don't really know how to respond.
WHO AM I?
Personal Brand is (sadly) a Whole Thing™. Although I'm not planning an imminent return to the workforce, I want to keep things consistent online2. That's all staying as "Terence" or @edent.
So I've slowly been re-introducing myself as Terry in social spaces. Some people take to it, some find it disturbingly over-familiar, some people still call me Trevor.
Hi! I'm Terry. Who are you?
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Except, of course, when I'd been naughty and my parents summoned me by using my full formal name including middle names. ↩︎
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I was put on a Performance Improvement Plan. Which was fair. ↩︎
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I completely sympathise with people who get married and don't want to take their spouse's name lest it sever all association with their hard-won professional achievements. ↩︎
Alex says:
@Edent i prefer David, but most people seem to call me Dave, especially if they haven't met me in person yet. I'll answer to just about anything, there's one group of people that know me as Reverend Dr Meagen. I sign my emails David and reply to whatever they call me.
@Edent my uncle didn't like his name, so when he went to university he just told everyone he was called a completely different name. Some of his friends from those days still know him by that name. Everyone in our family calls him one shortened version of his actual name, and his wife uses a different one.
@Edent my parents go as far as sometime calling me by an even longer version of my given name. I answer to bob, Rob or Robert. When I started Uni is when I chose bob. i keep on havign to remember that you have a real name which is isnt edent.
Thomas "Tom" Newton says:
@Edent Alex, full name Alexander Willmer. No middle name, but I use AAW on old-style arcade leader boards.
@Edent I've been lucky, in that "Hugo" isn't really abbreviable. On the other hand, I had to grow up being "Hugo", which wasn't ideal.
Could have been worse. I was nearly Bartholomew, which would have been *terrible* growing up alongside the start of the Simpsons.
And the story behind my brother's middle name (Cecil) is... convoluted, but awesomely weird.
@Edent @Scmbradley My dad went to seminary and all his friends who also dropped out from there (or something) permanently adopted their monk names.
So dad was called John by his parents, but *everyone* else knows him as Larry, because he was gonna be Brother Lawrence of the Sacred Heart (or something)
@Edent great post, Taras!
@Edent Teenage nicknames aside, I've only ever gone by Ben.
Like you, I used to get fullnamed by parents when I'd misbehaved. They don't get to do that now, as it's become a spousal privilege (or maybe burden?).
I'm always surprised how many people I know, though, who's "name" is actually their middle name because they don't like their first (I'm the other way, I don't like my middle name - really silly reason, but the dislike settled in at an impressionable age).
@Edent My sister has an escalating scale for summoning her kids
1. Given name
2. Given name plus family name
3. Full name including their middle names
4. Name in Irish
Erik says:
@Edent Two stories about this.
1: apparently my parents selected the name Giles cause it can’t be shortened. When my granddad (Bob) first met me, he reportedly said “hello Gi!”. I think of this often. I have also occasionally considered “Les” as a nickname, but not seriously.
2: aforementioned granddad was christened William and remained so until he started school, where there was another in the class. Teacher renamed him Bob and he was known by that name for the rest of his life.
@Edent … also, as a result of the title of this blog post I shall forever internally refer to any shenanigans you execute as “terencery”, as in “What kind of fresh terencery has he been up to now?”
Jan Ives says:
Merton says:
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