Nicknames are the only names anyone chooses for you honestly.

Your given name was a bet. Your parents placed it before they had met you, on a person who didn't exist yet, based on a sound they liked or a grandfather they missed or a book one of them was reading that year. It's a name for a hypothesis. Then you showed up and were whoever you were, and the name stayed on, and by the time anyone could tell whether it fit it was too late to change.

A nickname is the opposite. Somebody watches you for a while, long enough to see the thing that's actually there, and then they name it. It's the only time in your life anyone names you after the evidence.

Mine

I have a name that people get wrong, which isn't unusual, most people with a name from somewhere else do. What I didn't expect was how many versions of it I'd end up living inside.

There's the way my parents say it, which is the real one, with the vowels in the right places. There's the way the teacher said it on the first day of every school year, which was a question. There's the version my friends settled on in college, which is shorter and flatter and not really the same word, and which I answer to faster than the real one, because they were the people who were there when I became whatever I am. There's the version a barista writes on a cup, which is a different name entirely, and which I have on occasion answered to as well, because I was tired and the coffee was ready.

None of these is wrong. Each one is a different person, slightly, and I'm all of them, and I notice which one I'm depending on who is saying it. That's what a name does. It doesn't label the thing. It calls up a version of it.

The dog

We named a dog once, and it took two weeks, and I learned more about naming from those two weeks than from anything I have read.

The first names didn't take. We would say them and the dog would look at us and we would look at the dog and the name would just sit there in the air, not attached. It was clearly not her name. We tried others. Some of them she seemed to tolerate. And then one afternoon someone said a word, not even a real name, a word that was a joke about something she had done, and she turned her head, and that was it. The word was her. It had been waiting for her to do the thing that it named.

I don't think we chose the name. I think we found it. And I think that's the difference between a name that fits and one that does not: whether you're pinning a label on a thing or noticing the label that was already on it.

She had the joke name for eleven years. Nobody ever called her anything else. When she died I could not say it for a month.

The names inside a family

Every family has a private language, and most of it is names.

The chair that's called what it is called because of a thing that happened in 1994. The road that's called by the name of a shop that closed before the youngest child was born. The relative who's referred to by a title that isn't his relation to anybody. Nobody outside the family can use these names. They aren't secret. They're just not portable. They only work in the one room where everyone was there when the name got made.

I used to think this was clutter, the way families accumulate stuff. Now I think it's the family. Not the people, the names. When the people are gone the names are what's left, and the names are how you know you were in it. My grandmother had a word for a particular kind of bad mood, in a language that was not hers, that she had picked up from a neighbor before I was born, and I still use it, and nobody I say it to knows what it means, and when I say it she is briefly in the room.

Naming the unnamed

The other direction is stranger, and it is when you name a thing that didn't have a name and watch it become real.

I had a feeling for years, a specific one, a low hum of not being where I was, and I could not describe it and so I couldn't do anything with it. It was just weather. Then a friend, describing something of her own, used a phrase, three ordinary words in an order I hadn't heard, and I felt the thing in me turn its head like the dog had. That was it. It had a name now. And once it had a name I could see it coming, and say it to people, and notice that other people had it too, and the feeling that had been an unnameable fog for ten years became a thing I had, a thing with edges, a thing I could put down.

The feeling didn't change. But what I could do with it changed completely, and I don't know what to call that except that the name changed what it was.

The street I grew up on

The street I grew up on has been renamed. I found this out on a map, years after I had left, and I had a reaction out of all proportion to the facts. The street is still there. The house is still there. The new name is fine, it is for somebody who deserved a street.

But the old name was where I lived. I can't say the new one and mean my childhood. When I tell people where I grew up I use the old name and they cannot find it, and I have to explain, and the explaining is the feeling: that the place I'm from is now a place that only exists in the mouths of the people who were there. It has become a family name. Private. Not portable. The city moved on and left the old name in my head, and now it is mine, and in that sense the rename gave me something, though I wouldn't have chosen it.

What you call it changes what it is. And when they change what it is called, what it was stays with whoever still says the old word. That isn't nothing. That might be the only kind of ownership there is.