I don’t write a tremendous amount of posts on here these days. I used to be a multi-per-dayer but I also used to be extremely isolated from other people with a lot of free time on my hands. Regardless of the more recent dearth of posts, I’ve written a lot of them over the years…some 1,900 or so, in fact. Not as many as a lot of people, but a fair amount none the less.
My point being, that I’ve had this blog for a long long time.
My point in mentioning that is that I’ve probably written about this before, but I’m too lazy or disinterested to check.
I don’t have a lot of nicknames. You thought I was quitting, didn’t you?
I don’t have a lot of nicknames, and I don’t have any that aren’t just manipulations of my actual name. My mother claims that “Dave” is a nickname because David is my actual name, but I think we all know that that’s just crazy talk on her part.
I’ve been called “Kleemo” a few times, because that was the way a friend of mine with a heavy Thai accent used to say my last name…but I wouldn’t call it a regular thing.
No really abstracted names like K-man or DK or animal descriptors like Tiger or Moose.
They just don’t stick and I’m not sure why. I used to have a theory that it was because Dave is just too easy a word to say. Why would you need a nickname for a one-syllable word? I also had a private theory that it was because I was so varied and interesting that there wasn’t any one word that summed up my entire being sufficiently enough. The latter may be (secretly) true, but the former definitely isn’t as people have lately been taken with calling me “Kleeman”. I was, in fact, recently introduced to a group of people as “This is Sean, Jose, and this is Dave…we call him Kleeman.” To which, the introducee surprised me by saying “Oh! Yeah KLEEMAN!” as if I’d been mentioned before and she remembered the name…which is probably exactly true. I don’t know that I’d get the same reaction had I been “David” in whatever the story was.
Some people just have the kind of last name that works for things like this. Or maybe it’s the type of person? I’m not quite sure. I come from a military family, so it seems like a lot of us Kleemans have been called thusly…though my Dad was a Kleeman long before the military made him so.
Obviously, I can’t introduce myself this way without sounding like a total jerk, it just happens. And I can’t think of any people in my own life that I call by THEIR last names…though I DO give out a fair amount of nicknames.
I’m going exactly nowhere with this, by the way, it’s just something I was thinking about today.