Got to thinking about nicknames yesterday after a friend of mine called me Dianey. Haven't thought of that nickname in several years, and haven't been called that in many more.

My brothers used to call me that, insisting that one was supposed to pronounce the E. (This from a kid who called himself in his early years "Phidip" or "Phippis". The neighbor kid called him "Bebop".)

I don't recall how long the whole Dianey thing went on, but I didn't like it at the time. It doesn't bother me much now, but this is probably because I am an Adult, and as such have a much broader vocabulary enabling me to think up much better retaliatory nicknames in self-defense.

When my younger brother was four or five, he started calling me My Sweet. That was probably the most infuriating thing for me ever. At six or seven, I didn't want anyone to hear my little brother calling me My Sweet, but there wasn't really anything I could do except to ignore him, since I have never been prone to violence*. He eventually grew out of that charming little stage, but it seemed to go on for a long long time.

I believe it was in sixth grade that my friends and I decided that we should have nicknames, because in the mind of a ten-year-old your regular name just will not do. The funny thing was that we didn't come up with nicknames for each other, we just decided on the names by which we wanted to be addressed. I believe this was my friend's idea, and I don't recall protesting. She wanted to be called Skippy, and I chose Kiwi. Why? Who the hell knows. As I recall this last only about 2 weeks and then we moved onto some other juvenile nonsense.

In Davis, I was often called Juju. This was a derivation of my IRC name jujubee. This is also the root of jujufett, which is sort of a bastardization of Bobafett.

When I went off to college in Tulsa, I was affectionately called "Phil's sister" or Phillemina. It wasn't much of a nickname though, since hardly anyone called me that. Some people still call me Phillemina, because they are dumb.

Then I was called Cheetham. Also not much of a nickname, since that was one of my actual names. Some people still call me Cheetham, so now that that is no longer my name, I would consider it a nickname.

Most recently I have been called Maxie. My boss in the registrar's office called me Maxie because it went well with the name of one of her other employees. Her first name was Diana, so it wasn't very convenient to call us by our first names. So we were known as Maxie and Mincey. She still called me Maxie long after I stopped working for her.

I'm not a big fan of nicknames, despite all of those listed above. And yet I cannot help but to call my son a variety of names:

• Mr. Benjamin
• Mr. Bear
• Blondie Bear
• Mr. Benjamin the Bear
• and others...

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* Many people like to tell the story of how I supposedly stabbed my brother Phil in the face with a pencil, but this is an inaccurate portrayal. The actual happening was that Phil and I were helping clean up our toys one day, and in the process we found a pencil hidden along the edge of the shag carpet of the living room. Each of us had a hand on one end of the pencil, and we were pulling back and forth on it, rather like a seesaw, and I let go. Phil experienced first-hand Newtonian physics and jammed the pointy, leaden end of the pencil into his face between his upper lip and his nose. For a long time he had and possibly even still has a lead mark there, like a tiny tattoo. I maintain that I did not "stab" nor intend to maim him in any way.