If you were to design a nickname what would you consider?

I like other languages that translate to something beautiful, like foreign word that means beautiful flower or something along those lines. Or you could just go with stinky. That might work for either sex.

In my family, my grandfather was “Mouse”, my dad was “Bean”, and my aunt was “Cat”. All based on personality or physical attributes. I like those.

Once, there was a kid at church camp whom I had met several times, and whose name I couldn’t remember for the LIFE of me. Finally I just walked up to him and said “Hi, Charlie. Your name is now Charlie.”

As I got to know him better, I found out he was named after his father, who he had never gotten along with, and hated his name. When he got married, he and his new bride BOTH had their names legally changed – his to “Charles (Lastname)”

My nickname is Superman. I have been given this nickname TWICE by two different people, for two totally different reasons. I wish I had been nicknamed Batman, but you can’t pick your own nickname.
My son is an iron worker, so I am starting to call him Iron Man.

My first husband and I had strange nicknames for each other. On the outside, they seemed to mean one thing, but secretly they were something else.
I called him Dinky. People thought that was a slam on his personal stature. If that had been the case, I’d have been calling him towel rack. LOL. Somewhere in my youth I had encountered a character called Dinky Dragon. I called him Dinky because he kept waking up with the MEAN dragon breath.
He called me Flounder, and again, people thought it was some slam – on my hygiene. It was actually because of the way I flopped around when I “Got there”.

My wife likes it when I call her “Doll”.
She doesn’t like it when I call her “Dogkiller”. (She has, unfortunately, run over dogs twice.)

A bit ridiculous, but one day I played a RPG game and I came up with nicknames for my characters, based on their appearance and their (made up by me) personalities:
Fat (because he’s the biggest of the team)
Goldfish (because according to his description he’s very elegant)
Bookworm (because he’s very thin and his face looks like someone who reads a lot)
Ice (because he looks unemotional)
Baby (because he has the softest voice and looks the most gentle).

My only nicknames are Pendy and Penderdragon.
Called a kid named Porter… Porter Potty.
We liked to call my math teacher Broseidon, God of the Brocean.
Nicknames tend to be inside Jokes, or screwing around with their last names for me.

If I were to create a nickname for someone, it would be based on some personality trait of theirs that sticks out a lot, or a passion they have. I have no examples.

My husband has about ten nicknames for me. Some are from seemingly nowhere, just pulled from the sky. One is Tana, which has nothing to do with my name or anything really. He also uses my given name shortened in a couple different ways. He and my sister sometimes call me by the Spanish name my 7th grade Spanish teacher gave me. I had an employee who called me Maserati, because he thought my last name was similar. I’ll answer to almost anything. LOL. But, by in large people call me by my proper given name.

Once in a while my husband calls me dear, as in, “yes dear,” and that pisses me off. Otherwise he never calls me the commonly used English terms spouses use, he never calls me honey. I call him honey sometimes. I also have a few nicknames, one is Tano in response to his Tana. He still way outnumbers me on nickname usage.

I don’t usually give people nicknames, except I often shorten people’s name if they will let me. I never think to give them a nickname because of something they did or how they look.

Here’s an amusing little anecdote totally true.

After my nephew was born and as he was learning to talk, my sister proposed that we come up with a nickname for me that was easy to pronounce so he wouldn’t have to struggle with it. Something like Mookie or MuMu was her brilliant idea.

My name is not at all difficult to pronounce even if it has three syllables. It doesn’t lend itself easily to shortening or nick naming; thus all my life I’ve been called by my full name so I thought this was the most preposterous thing I’d ever heard and flatly refused to concoct something for the sole purpose of making things easier for him rather than the normal process all kids go through in learning to talk.

What I did agree to was that if he himself came up with some mangled up version of my name in his attempts to say it, I’d be totally fine with that regardless of what it was. (There are a lot of cute nicknames in families from children’s attempts to say them for the first time. But that’s a natural thing not a manufactured one.

So just let him deal with it and figure something out. I was not going to have something artificially concocted merely to save him from the “pain” of “struggling” to say my name. Its just not that difficult a name.

(It was her firstborn and she was spoiling him rotten in countless ways large and small.)

I’ll use a name very similar to mine to illustrate what finally happened. Lets just say it was Madeline, also three syllables.

The first time he said my name, he just logically shortened it to two syllables and it came out as MAD…LINE; a rather elegant solution for a two year old. Worked for me.

And I had a good laugh at my sister and all her angst about her poor child having to struggle with his Aunt’s name :)

And I still don’t have a nickname and still don’t want one. I like mine just as is.

Nicknames have always been linked to people’s surnames around these here parts.
Mostly we just add a Y on the end, Jonesy/Smithy & in my case Willy…yeah go on, laugh it up.

My nickname at home was ‘Mongol’. I did not care for it.

@ucme It’s the ’‘these here parts’’ that made me laff.

@Symbeline I hope you were aware I was whistling through my teeth when saying the S’s in that, pure authentic frontier gibberish.

@ucme I wasn’t aware, but I was imagining it myself. :D

Atta gal