Guest blogger Mary Elizabeth Barr Mann’s family has always called her Bessie, a name she deems fit only for torch singers, great beauties….or cows.

My birth certificate reads “Mary Elizabeth” . Perhaps more importantly in my family, my baptismal certificate reads “Mary Elizabeth”. But, to my father and my brother, I am “Bessie.”

My mother’s name is Mary, and so my father has never called me such. Dr. Freud would approve. And while my extended family makes the distinction by calling me “Mary Beth,” somehow my dad came up with Bessie and thought it was adorable. When my parents discovered that Bessie was easy for my toddler brother to pronounce, it stuck. At least on the nuclear level.

As you might imagine, in my adolescence, I did not like being Bessie. It was not, nor is it yet again, popular. While the U.S. Census pegged Bessie as the 13th most popular girls’ name in 1880, it plummeted out of the top 100 by 1930 and nosedived from the top 1000 by 1970.

Worse yet for my teenage years, Bessie is neither sleek, nor sexy. It is not stylish. Not a single model in Seventeen magazine ever had that name. And, though somewhere in a corner of Park Slope there may be an urban hipster mother plotting to bring back the name is a burst of ugly-chic, to this day Bessie remains shunned.

The nickname didn’t bother me as a very young child. Heck, I was surrounded by relatives with equally unattractive, ragged-old-laundry-hanging-in-the-back-alley names—like Reenie (for Irene) and Mossie (for Martha). But by my teenage years, I really, really wanted my dad and my brother—and by now my younger sisters who had gotten in on the act—to quit it. The worst was when my brother’s friends would tease me about the name: “Bessie the cow.” “Old Bess, my gun.” (And this from a kid with a big schnoz whose surname was Finnochio. Sheesh.)

Sure, there was Bessie Smith. And Bess Myerson—the first Jewish Miss America. But that was IT. Unless you were belting out the blues with a voice full of sorrow and steel, or you were transcendentally beautiful, this was not a good name. With my reedy soprano, eyeglasses and frizzy hair, I was none of these things (although I have since graduated to contact lenses!).

(more…)

Sometimes pre-natal nickname stories have a happy ending. For instance, when my British mother-in-law was pregnant with my husband, she was planning to follow the family tradition of using the initials C and R for the names of the boys in the family. Dad was Roy Colin, and they settled on Roger Clive for their first son. The only thing was that all through the pregnancy, her in-laws insisting on referring to the fetus as Christopher Robin, as in “How’s little Christopher Robin doing?” In the end, they heard this so often that when the time came, he couldn’t be anything but Christopher Robin–and their second son became Roger Clive.

Granted, that isn’t really a nickname example–this is more about the sometimes silly pet names we give our babies-to-be which shouldn’t be allowed into the delivery room. Think of little Peanut Rademacher, son of General Hospital star Ingo. Now picture him calling up a girl for a date and saying “Hi, my name is Peanut Rademacher.” It seems that, according to the dad, “We were calling him that when he was in mommy” and they couldn’t let it go.

Of course the individual names people use in pregnancy are infinite, but here are a few not-to-go-on-the-birth-certificate examples I’ve run across. (And bear in mind the title of one of our favorite blogs–”You can’t call it ‘it’!”

/

BABY DUMPLING
BEAN
BINKY
BOOBIE
BUMPKIN, LUMPKIN, PUMPKIN
BUMPO
BUMPY, JUMPY
BUNNY
CHICKPEA
CLETUS (the fetus)
EMBRY
FISHY
FRISKY
GIBLET, NIBLET
GREMLIN
JUNEBUG
JUNIOR
LAMBKIN
LOLLIPOP
MONKEY
MUNCHKIN
NUGGET
PEANUT
PEEWEE
PIE
POPPET
PIXEL, PIXIE
POOH
PUDDING
SCHMOO
SHRIMP
SMIDGE
SNOOKIE, SNOOKS
SPROUT
SQUIRT
SWEETPEA
TOOTSIE, TOOTSIE ROLL
WEENIE

You probably have one or two of your own to add to the list.

I was talking to an acquaintance the other day and when she mentioned her young daughter Becca, I suddenly thought, “Hey, whatever happened to  Becky?”  You rarely hear of a Rebecca under the age of 13 these days who is called by that traditional diminutive.

This is something that happens with pet forms in general–they go through phases and changes as much as–or indeed more than–the mother name.  For example when you hear the name Elizabeth, you have no idea of her age–she could be 99 or 9 months old–but you can certainly guess that Betty is a Grandma and that Liz and Beth are probably young adults. 

Some other examples: Patricia’s nicknames went from Patsy to Patty to Pat to Tricia to Trish to practically non-existent.  The no longer popular Mary spawned any number of offshoots before it faded, including Mamie, Molly and Polly.  Katherine moved from Kate and Katie to Kit and Kitty to Kay and Kathy, back to Kate and Katie,  to the current Kat; and Edward launched not only Eddie and Ward but Ed, Ted and Ned.

But the prizes for the two names with the most mutable  pet forms and offshoots have to go to Margaret and Elizabeth, many of whose diminutives have become stand-alone names.  Here, in the roughest chronological order, is what Margarets and Elizabeths been known as over time:

MARGARET

PEG
PEGGY
MAGGIE
MAGO

MARGO

MAY
DAISY
MADGE
MIDGE
MAISIE
MARGIE
MEGGIE
MEG
GRETA

ELIZABETH

TIBBY
ELIZA
BETSY
BESS
BESSIE
ELSIE
BETTA
ELSA
BETTY
BETH
LIBBY
LIZBETH
ELISA
ELISE
LISA
LIZA
LIZZIE
LIZ
(But note that many, if not most baby Elizabeths these days are called Elizabeth.)

When the latest starbaby was announced the other day, Michele Hicks and Jonny Lee Miller’s boy Buster, I wasn’t as surprised as I would have been a few years ago.  Already on our celebrity kids’ roster, after all, are Buck and Lucky and Marmaduke and Duke and King and Prince and Princess and Count and Countess, names once reserved for other species.  On  the other hand, few of these names appear on pooch popularity lists.

And neither do Fido or Rover or Spot or Lassie, the old traditional canine favorites, which have been replaced by top-listed Maggie and Molly and Max and Jake.  Is there some kind of switch going on, or is this just a way of affirming to our pets that they are indeed full-fledged members of the family, so that in addition to getting spiffy wardrobes, health insurance, doggy day care and spas and shrinks, they get a real kid’s name too?  For the first time ever, 50% of all pet names come from the human name pool, and a recent survey showed that 74% of participants viewed their dogs and cats as family members rather than merely family pets.

Celebrities have jumped into this people’s-names-for-pets phenomenon with particular enthusiasm.  For example,the following have or have had dogs named Bob and Stan (David Letterman),  Flossie (Drew Barrymore), Milo (Diane Lane), Martha Stewart (Jennifer Garner & Ben Affleck), Lloyd (Courtney Love), and Chloe (both Lindsay Lohan and Lauren Conrad).  Hey, wait a minute–Chloe is my daughter’s name!

Here are some of the most popular human names for dogs, Max being the overall favorite:

ABBY

BAILEY

CHARLIE

CODY

DAISY

JACK

JAKE

KATIE

LUCY

MAGGIE

MAX

MOLLY

SADIE

SAM/SAMANTHA

SASHA

TOBY

ZOE