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Sri Juneja's avatar

As someone who has been asked many times if I’ve got an easier name or nickname, everything you write rings true. We have a Mo (I met him as a Mo) and now I feel emboldened enough to ask him if he’d rather we call him Mohammad.

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The Feral Astrologer's avatar

Ok, now I must ask the Mo in my life what he prefers, too! (He introduced himself as Mo, but you never know). My go to is to never use abbreviations of people's names unless they say it themselves, probably because I am sensitive to having felt no agency over my own name.

My parents always called me by a hyphenated name. Imagine my surprise when I became old enough to see my own birth certificate and realized…they had forgotten to record it hyphenated with the government. Lol.

My three older sisters have never called me by my given name. Like, ever. I'm almost 50 and I am "Aunty X" to their children. People still ask me what my nickname means or what the origins are, and the truth is nicknames made up by children under the age of six usually don't make any sense.

When I was 15 years old, I decided to drop the second part of my hyphenated first name. My mother was so angry. Even though it's not on my passport or birth certificate or any other document.

Names are such a fascinating topic, to me. I never took my husband's name when I got married because I like my father's surname too much. But I joke about changing it because of my allegedly hyphenated first name: my husband's name is a Dutch name, two words, the first being a "de" with a little D. If you were to string my names together with his and my last name combined, it sounds like a children's song from the 1800s. I just don't want five actual words for my name on my legal documents because I've heard from other friends who come from cultures with many different names that it can be cumbersome.

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