Call me Ishmael.
My collection of nicknames
When we adopted our second family dog, I called him Waffles (though I was ten at the time and insisted that his name should be spelt Wafflez on his name tag, evidently because Zs were, or possibly still are, cooler than Ss). My dad certainly has used our dog’s given name, often yelling it at length, attempting to recapture him after the scallywag decided that chasing after prize geese or young lambs seemed fun, but when Waffles is behaving himself, Dad rarely calls him by his name. Dad prefers numerous and often improvised pet names for the dog in the form of gibberish said in a sweet tone. I enjoy these names and have co-opted a selection for my continued use. Mom has adopted Wafi as the capital name for our pet, which, albeit more sensible, is still a nickname. The dog is rarely ever addressed in full, but he doesn’t seem to mind.
My parents have also got a nickname for me, they call me Jem. Somewhere after university, I read To Kill a Mockingbird, in which the protagonist’s brother is called Jeremy Finch, but she (the protagonist) always calls him Jem. It was the first time I’d heard the nickname used for anyone other than myself. Naturally, most of my extended family has followed suit and calls me Jem, too, which I quite enjoy. It seems to be more popular with my mom’s family than with my dad’s, with the only reasonable explanation I can think of being that Dad’s family is first language Afrikaans, and somehow Jem just isn’t as comfortable in the mouth. The nickname never caught on with my school friends. Aside from one friend in high school who almost exclusively called me Jezza (which I first heard the Top Gear boys use to address Jeremy Clarkson), my school friends never really had a nickname for me. My grade head for the final year of high school, whom I continued to befriend after completing my bachelor’s, would shout down the hall when he saw me, calling, “Jere-you!” Pointing at me with both arms fully extended, elbows locked and then bringing both arms swinging back towards himself with thumbs extended, finished off by cheering, “Jere-me!” He was very proud of that. Otherwise, I had no sport or academia-related names like ‘short stop’ or other nonsense in the movies. No surname-related names, either, or shortenings of my name. I was only ever Jeremy to my school friends.
Somehow, Jem stuck with my university friends. One Saturday in First Year, my parents (my mom) told me to organise an outing to a favourite farmer’s market of ours and invite all of my uni friends so that my parents (my mom) could meet them. Of course, I thought this was enormously embarrassing. Of course, my friends had a great time. That’s when they first overheard my parents’s nickname for me and decided to carry the torch.
I was always quite disappointed that my school friends never preferred using a nickname for me. As a child, around the age when I thought Zs were cooler than Ss, when prompted by a video game or computer to choose a username, I defaulted to J-man. Perhaps it’s best that that didn’t catch on. Since living in Germany, my patience has been rewarded. Jerry was a popular nickname with my girlfriend’s dad when we first met (to my mother’s disgust, in whose opinion the name has been sullied by Jerry Springer). After spending some more time with her family, I was subsequently given the name Jerres, the suffix of which is very evocative of Cologne, it was later explained to me. My name was a little too foreign for some older members of the extended German family, to whom I am now known as Jeremias (which is a more familiar version because of the biblical figure). The most recent incarnation of my name, and the most unique of all, is Jaymo. There are three nieces in the family. When I was introduced to the oldest, she could speak well enough that she didn’t trip over my name as she said it. The youngest has just turned one and is yet to tackle a word quite so complex as my name. The middle niece, however, whom I see the most often on account of her also living in Berlin, when attempting to say my name, could only utter Jaymo. I love it. Everyone calls me Jaymo now, even my girlfriend. Everyone except for Mom and Dad. I’ll always be Jem to them.
Come to think of it, a few of my school friends called me Jerry, too, until my mother expressly forbade them. Maybe they were too frightened to try another and decided it was safest to stick with Jeremy. If you enjoyed this journal, please subscribe.
It’ Jem for me- picked up from your mom 😊