Connect! Unite! Act! ATTN: Dallas, Detroit & NYC! +Q: What Was Your Childhood Nickname?

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Were you given a nickname as a kid? Did you love it or hate it?
How did you earn it, and how long did it follow you around?
Does anyone else in your life still call you by it?

I hereby do solemnly swear that if you reveal an embarrassing nickname I will never tease you about it in the future.

My given name doesn't easily lend itself to nicknames, so I didn't have to deal with endless abbreviations or diminutives while growing up. For a brief while I was called Sputnik as a result of taking my first steps the day the world's first satellite was launched. But my second nickname that lasted a great deal longer was given by my older brother Richard, who'd been called a Dick for years (or, arguably even worse, Dickie-bird) and knew the consequences of nicknames.

I was a Twiggy-thin 13 year old, having just shot up to 5'8" without gaining any weight or undergoing the slightest adolescent "development." Junior high school boys had taken to calling me Pirate's Dream (sunken chest) or Carpenter's Dream (flat as a board).

Richard, who was eight years older, had gone through a similar growth spurt, suddenly shooting up to 6'4" one summer with the consequence of passing out a few times while his blood figured out how to make the climb to his suddenly distant brain before hypoxia took him out. When I confided my embarrassing new nicknames to him while we played ping pong in the apartment building's Rec room, he said I wasn't skinny, I was slinky. From then on he called me Slink, well after I outgrew my toothpick legs and string bean arms.

There are so many things you miss about a sibling once they've walked on, and one of the things I miss most about Richard is picking up the phone and hearing his cheerful, "Hey, Slink! What's up!"

BTW: Since I currently don't have a nickname I checked the Nickname Generator and was given the nickname of.....SPANKY.

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