All the males in my family changed their names. That is, everyone had a nickname and none of us liked the ones we were given. So: My father, known as Buddy, until he went to college, became John, which matched his birth certificate.. In the next generation, Burr (short for Burgess, his middle name) became Joe which is of course the common nickname for Joseph, his first given name. Jay became John (I don’t know why Jay didn’t suit him). I moved from Teddy (hated being called a Teddy Bear) and became Ed (which you know as “Mr. Ed” on this site. Much better than Teddy, don’t you think – especially since it goes so well with my picture.) Willie (short for William, of course), became Bill. He simply announced one day he wanted all of us to call him Bill. No one questioned his decision, and from that day on, he was Bill. Years later, he said he had no idea that Bill was a common nickname for William. There was simply another boy down the block named Bill, and Willie thought he was cool, so he would be Bill as well.
I’m not sure what my parents would do if they had it to do all over again. … and my mother said all she wanted was one girl.
My birth certificate name is "Jonathan David", relatively common among English-speaking Ashkenazi Jews, and prevalent among sons in my father's ancestral line, anecdotally descending from a 19th century Vilnian rabbi of blessed memory, named, via transliteration, Nosson Dovid. Read More
As you may know it’s traditional in Jewish families to give children the names or initials of loved-ones who have died. And so when we were expectant parents we planned to name the baby after my late father-in-law whose name was Naftali.
My woman’s intuition told me we’d have a girl, and the name we chose for her was Nina. And on the improbable – or so I thought – chance we’d have a boy, we held the name Noah in abeyance.
Then – so much for my mother wit and my woman’s intuition – we had a boy, and so Noah it was! (See My Brown-Eyed Girl)
We thought it a wonderful name for our son and a bit unusual, but when he started kindergarten we discovered there were two other Noahs in the class. Their teacher, In order to distinguish among the three, taught them to use their last initials, and so henceforth they were known as Noah R, Noah G, and Noah L.
On Mother’s Day that year I got a lovely card that I proudly taped to the fridge. My kindergartner had drawn a big red heart and beneath it were the words – LOVE, NOAH L
