What's in a name?

[lnr]

I've always found it vaguely interesting the way names kind of drift around me. It used to be I was always Eleanor to most people I knew at school or college or whatever, LNR to people I knew online and Ellie to family. But somehow Ellie has this habit of leaking out into social circles occasionally, usually through partners, and getting into general circulation. So I was Ellie for quite a bit while going out with Matthew in Oxford, and there seem to be a largish group in Cambridge these days to whom I'm Ellie too. I know a couple of people have said they find it odd, since they don't think of me by that name.

I'm always amused at how much LNR gets out in real life too. It sounds funny out loud, but even Richard's parents call me it in mail. In a lot of ways it's kind of like that's my initials, or at least it gets used in places other people use initials anyway. That's why ecb39 doesn't feel like quite me. Though Paul vetoed me from conspiring with the operators to get me a spare CRSid for lnr. And as you can see I use it lowercase too these days, though initially it was always in caps.

Other nicknames I've had have mostly died. I was Polar Blair for a long while at school, and somehow that got mutated in Polaroid at times too. And I've been Perditax sometimes as well, nickname given to me by a certain Gotterdamerell. I mostly save that as the name of the windows personality of my computer these days, though it sometimes gets an outing on irc. eleanorb has only ever been a username, but I often find myself having to hit backspace at the end when typing my name, I've been using it so long. hert0145 has been gone for 5 years now, but I still half fancy the idea of a tshirt with it on.

To me I'm just me.

Comments

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

Hurrah for three-letter lower-case nicknames. We rule.

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

'LNR' and 'Eleanor' sounds sufficiently similar whne I say them that I figured I didn't need to make up my mind which I use in speech.

I'm not sure I could call you Ellie, I think I'd feel like I was being overly familiar.

[ptc24.livejournal.com]

Likewise. LNR and Eleanor seem to merge into one...

[simont]

I get somewhat hung up on this one as well (as I think I've mentioned to you before). In the presence of people calling you "Ellie", calling you LNR/Eleanor (like ghoti I don't think I distinguish them in pronunciation) seems terribly formal - I suspect because I'm mentally spelling it LNR no matter how I pronounce it, and although that isn't actually a set of initials it looks as if it should be, and therefore it feels like a formal mode of address. But at the same time I haven't yet been able to call you Ellie, simply because years of habit prevent me from remembering until I'm already past the second syllable.

Since you keep saying you don't mind much either way, I try not to worry about it, but the pedantic part of me that always wants to find just the right word for every occasion has a hard time letting go of the problem :-)

[damerell.livejournal.com]

Don't do it, man. _I_ don't call her "Ellie".

[lnr]

:-)

[lnr]

I find it weird that you could think of LNR as formal. To me that's like thinking ewx or Mobbsy is formal. I don't think of Eleanor as any more formal than Ellie, so don't worry about it.

I find the lack of distinction in pronunciation amusing. When I say people have called me LNR IRL I mean actually pronouncing the R at the end as AR, which I can't imagine anyone doing when saying the word Eleanor.

Actually I've just remembered another name. In Tatties I'm Elena. I say Eleanor, they write it down like that, and then the runner pronounces it the other way.

[northernmonkey.livejournal.com]

I'm Ellie to everybody.... but I get a bit confused when people call me by my name. I'm just me. To me I have no name. I don't need one.

xxxx