by Carolyn Lanier

Created on: February 14, 2009

One of my favorite pass time's when I'm feeling blue, or just plain bored, is going through our local phone book looking up funny and unusual names.

My favorites are Minnie Blind, Crystal Glass, Mia Smart, and Mark Works. One thing I can't figure out is why someone would call their child Newt. At birth do they look like one of those small amphibious salamanders. Some people get their nickname from the color of their hair, like Red or Cotton.

Some nicknames are actually cruel, being pinned on someone by classmates, like Four eyes, peg leg, freckles, piggy, shrimp, Goofy or Dumbo. Names like these can actually scar a person for life, especially if their sensitive about having to wear glasses, hate their freckles or their ears stick out more than most people's, or they may be shorter than the rest of the class.

Some nicknames can also be ego boosters, letting you know that you are a real sweet person, like Candy, Princess, Honey, and Angel to name a few. Since I love baseball, I hang out at a nearby park watching different games, in T-Ball, I hear so many parents calling their young sons Little Man. and in the older league, this one teenage boy, every time he comes to bat, I hear people shouting, knock it out of the park Slugger. So I guess a lot of nicknames come from things we're good at, or our personalities.

This is a true story of how my niece got her nickname, She's grown now with children of her own, but As a toddler, she was hard to potty train. My sister in law would buy all these cute little ruffled panties for her and take her to the bathroom about every thirty minutes or so trying to get her trained, but still, she'd find little puddles all over the floor, so the nickname Puddles was pinned on her and today we still all call her that.

My four year old great grandson picked out his own nickname, he calls himself Rabbit, and calls his paw paw and I turtles, because he says he's fast and we're slow. Even when I call him a little rug rat, he'll correct me and say I'm not a rug rat, I am a rabbit.

As a child, I never had a nick name, but a few years back before I retired, Some of my co-workers called me Dingy because I'd forget what I was doing at times, but that didn't bother me, I nicked named one girl Dimples, because she did have the prettiest deep dimples.

Even when we pick out screen names for the Internet, a lot of us pick out names that describe our interest or how we feel about ourselves, like Crazy, Cat lover, wild child, these too are pretty much consider like a nick name that we are choosing for ourselves. Nick names are great to have if the right one is picked, especially if its one that will stick with us our entire life.

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