Nick-Names

When my daughter was born, naming her was easy.  Antoinette was my mother's name, pretty and unusual, the feminine for Anthony, unlike the guttural Agnes that I was saddled with.  Named after my father's mother, not only was Agnes an ugly name, but the things that rhyme with the abbreviated "Aggie" just scream out traumatic childhood.  Little did it matter that in Italian it has a beautiful sound and pretty damn lofty meaning.  While I was always Agnes, my mother was never called by her beautiful name; she was known as "Dora."  Who knows why.  My poor mom as a little girl, aeons before the days of Dora the Explorer, I'm sure had been hammered with clever and alliterative epithets like "dumb Dora."

So my sweet firstborn was Antoinette.  My father, who was eternally mourning my mother, whom he had tormented with complaints and criticism all her life, tried to call my baby "Dora" once when we were visiting, and when she was only a few months old.  In a rare display of unity, my two sisters and I shouted, "NO!" and informed my father that she was NOT going to be Dora.

Relatives on the other side began to call her Toni, which never stuck, I guess because she wasn't a Toni.  Not on my watch.  So Antoinette it was.

Of course, when she began to speak, her name was quite a mouthful.  So "Antoinette" became "Ettyouette" which of course we thought was adorable, and somehow it became shortened it to "Etty."  I have a scarf I knitted for my little girl, with "Etty" embroidered on it.

And then, when she went to school, we all gave up Etty.  Since then, Antoinette has occasionally been "Ant," most often by herself in her own writing, but not to her face by anyone else.  So, Antoinette it remains.

When my son came along, the agreement had been that since the first child had been my choice, from my side of the family, the second would be from my husband's side.  Had the second been a girl it most likely would have been Sophia, somehow after his sister Elaine?  Go figure.  More likely, it was the feminine of his own name, Stephan, which I think I was told was the Americanized version of Sophianos.  Which doesn't make any more sense than Dora from Antoinette, as the Greek name is Stefanos.  But I do have fond memories of Stephan's Aunt Faye tunefully calling out, "Oh, Sofionoulyi!"  Also interesting is that "Stephan," pronounced "Stefan" was further misspelled by his mother on the birth certificate, which reads, "Stephen."

But our second wasn't a girl, and Stephan has a family full of Johns and Williams, and we weren't interested in having a junior.  So we were thinking of Greek-sounding male alternatives and ended up with Alexander and Nicholas.  And somehow decided that Nicholas was the more unusual.

So my second child was named Nicholas.  And, although I only know this through our home videos, we began to call the boy "Nicky."

And then, one day in my son's infancy, we were shopping at the mall, and from many different directions, throughout the course of the afternoon, we heard the echo of my son's nickname.  Nicky/Nikki had apparently become the name of choice for pretty much most of the kids in our suburban neighborhood.

We were crestfallen.  We (honestly, it was probably me that was behind all this) had truly thought that we had come up with a rare and noble name for our unique second child.  I recall that we talked long and seriously about this quandary.  And eventually we came up with a solution:  Our son's nickname became "Nikko."  And it worked.  It is a name as rare and wonderful as "Antoinette."  He has tried to be called Nicholas at times, but I think in the end he just gave a philosophical shrug and accepted that he was, indeed, "Nikko."