![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
muckefuckOn Saturday, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
welcomerain noted the tongue-in-cheek nature of my comment that I chose "Da" as a nickname to avoid nominal problems. In fact, it causes as much trouble as it avoids; people pronounce it as anything from "Duh" to "Don". But I can allow myself even more self-righteous condescension as a result, pointing out, "It's only two letters. How could you get that wrong?" And few people who learn it ever forget it again. This contrasts starkly with my Christian name, which people have been known to use correctly through one or more conversations and then, on another occasion, substitute it with another name that resembles it only in designating an Old Testament figure and starting with the same letter. Do other people have that problem? Do the "Marks" out there ever get called "Matthew"--or vice-versa? (This I consider a very different phenomenon from the Christy/Christine/Cristina/Kristen/etc. problem, where different variants of the "same name" get confused. They're related only in both being the result of having a relatively small pool of given names, which may ease the general learning load, only to overburden it in particular cases.)
welcomerain noted the tongue-in-cheek nature of my comment that I chose "Da" as a nickname to avoid nominal problems. In fact, it causes as much trouble as it avoids; people pronounce it as anything from "Duh" to "Don". But I can allow myself even more self-righteous condescension as a result, pointing out, "It's only two letters. How could you get that wrong?" And few people who learn it ever forget it again. This contrasts starkly with my Christian name, which people have been known to use correctly through one or more conversations and then, on another occasion, substitute it with another name that resembles it only in designating an Old Testament figure and starting with the same letter. Do other people have that problem? Do the "Marks" out there ever get called "Matthew"--or vice-versa? (This I consider a very different phenomenon from the Christy/Christine/Cristina/Kristen/etc. problem, where different variants of the "same name" get confused. They're related only in both being the result of having a relatively small pool of given names, which may ease the general learning load, only to overburden it in particular cases.)