What's in a name?
For deeply personal and emotional reasons, Isasauce wrote about going by his given name rather than his middle. For very different impetuses, I've had name-changing considerations recently, too, and want to talk about them.
My full name is Daniel C. Hodges.
Like my half-siblings before me, our mother derived for me a nickname for her personal use. Whereas my sister's Michelle became Miki, and my brother's William became Bill, she combined my first two initials to invent Deece, occasionally lengthened to Deece'l.
In my mother's family, Daniel was infantilized to Danny long before I had any input on the matter.
In the autumn of my sixth-grade year, a church youth retreat afforded older high-schoolers the rich opportunity to gently harass the incoming middle-schoolers by giving us doofy nicknames. As an evergreen nerd and social pariah, pejorative appellations were par for the course, and so an imposed nickname of Thor barely moved the needle. Others' commitment to the bit meant that the new kid came to be actually known as "Thor", around which I tried to build a personality of wackiness, spontaneity, and agreeability to supplement the preexisting PC-building Trekkie.
A friend and I jokingly traded nicknames after I had trouble remembering his, and I signed off my letters to him as Tony.
Online, my two longest-lasting recurring screen names were the odd derivations of SrTHORius and pd_THOR.
Stationed at Keesler Air Force Base for job training, I arrived from basic training extremely sleep-deprived. After an entire day of in-processing, my two roommates gave me the lay of the land. When I sleepily doubled the fullness of my two-thirds-full laundry bag, my already-nicknamed fellow airmen decided I would be called Four Thirds.
In my six years of active-duty military life, I held five sequentially rising ranks, which came with two non-specific titled names by which I was known: Airman Hodges and Sergeant Hodges (though those titles sometimes used my specific rank, instead: Airman Basic, Airman, Airman First Class, Senior Airman, or Staff Sergeant).
I was permanently assigned to three different units, and despite never ever introducing myself as such, my superiors would invariably wind up calling me Dan. I never pushed back; it never bothered me. I am, though, surprised by the reliability and consistency with which this repeated itself.
In the late aughts, I was frustrated by having to always embellish 'Thor' when establishing myself anywhere new online, as well as that name's association with the burgeoning Marvel Cinematic Universe. I cast around for something both self-identifiable and unique. It took too long to combine 'Thor' and 'Four Thirds' into Fourthords, but I was immensely proud of the portmanteau.
In recent years, I learned that my middle name holds no familial or historical significance, but that my parents just liked the cadence of the three-syllable name. Having been jealous of and fascinated by generational post-nominals since the third grade, I'm giving more than casual consideration to changing my name to Daniel Franklin Hodges II. I've never gone by my middle name, and if it doesn't have any rationale (emotional or other), then why shouldn't I seize it to fulfill a nigh-lifelong dream?
