The Sassy Lawyer recently trackbacked to a long discussion we’re having on my blog on names and nicknames — okay, my family’s names and nicknames.

I have no theories about those cutesy Pinoy nicknames; much has already been written (usually by expats, tourists and P.J. O’Rourke) about the “weirdness” of full-grown adults with names like Baby, Girlie, Boy, Bhoy, Sonny and so on. Let me set them outsiders straight: it is not weird; all the infantilizing is in their heads. Some folks may be tempted to see it as laying an odd claim to the glamour/grammar of English, and that might be true. (Though I did grew up with Cherry Pies and Sugar Pies and Honeybees — and a male college classmate actually named Cookie Macapanpan (first Google hit!) — and it does sound somewhat painful.)

I’m a little more interested in the whole host of Juniors and the Thirds (and by implication, Juns and Jun-Juns) — a failure of imagination, or some vestigial (or obvious) act of patriarchy? And what about those themed names? And those one-letter names (Romeo, Ramon, Rodel, etc., or — hee hee — Leny and Lily)? Are they ways of unifying siblings further through the magic bond of letters, or a gesture toward reproductive seriality?

I’ve always kind of liked — though not, when it came down to it, for our daughter Izzy — those remixed names. Thus, Rene and Ellie would have a daughter named Renel — or Renelle, Ranelle, Rhanelle, Rhenelle, etc. It seemed to me to be a kind of rebellion against “standard” orthography and “standard” forms of naming, though it’s difficult to spell over the phone.

(Just by utter coincidence, there’s a thread on this very topic going on on Orkut — are any of you readers on this? It actually seems cooler than Friendster.)

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