Between killing off wives, Henry VIII decreed that all his subjects should take surnames. Francis of France made a similar decree. Surnames became a necessity for 16th century rulers in order to keep track of their increasingly-mobile subjects; and since then, of course, we've become ever more numerous and mobile, and our governments still figure it's best to keep track of who is who. Even first and last names together are sometimes ambiguous now -- I know of at least two other people with whom I share first and last names, though I don't think I share a middle initial with either of them. Still, in most circumstances giving a full name is sufficient to establish oneself unambiguously.
In elementary and middle school, I usually went by Dave
(or
Dave B.
in the case when my first name alone was ambiguous --
as it usually was). Around the end of middle school or the
beginning of high school, I began to be called by my last name. My
martial arts instructor called me Mr. Bindel,
partly because
he was particular about etiquette, and partly because there were
several of us named Dave.
When my brother Scott joined the
class, he added big
and little
to Mr. Bindel
;
I've forgotten how he handled the few times when he saw us with our
father. By the end of high school, I was Dave
or
Bindel
or (in martial arts class) Mr. Bindel
; and more
rarely I was David.
But I would answer to any of those names.
A curious thing happened while I was an undergraduate. I started
meeting or interacting with people through e-mail and electronic
newsgroups -- mostly those for my computer science coursework --
before I'd had much (if any) face-to-face interaction. I sign my
name David,
and so that's how I came to be addressed by those
people, even when we actually met. By the end of college, I was
David
or Bindel,
except for a few friends and
acquaintances, mostly people I'd known from high school or the first
two years as an undergraduate, who called me Dave.
And now? I answer to my first name, my last name, my nickname, or
any reasonable superposition of the three, but I seem to be called
Dave
a lot less than I once was. It's interesting, though,
to note who calls me by which name. I wonder, sometimes, whether
the people who say different names would have different averaged
perceptions of me -- though putting meaningful numbers to
perceptions is beyond me, and taking statistics of such numbers is
perhaps better left to pollsters, cognitive psychologists,
astrologists, or people who fall into some combination of those
categories. It's all the same person, but the different names do go
with different activities. It was Mr. Bindel who stood on one good
ankle and wondered why he was letting someone attack him with a
knife; it was Bindel who caused much hilarity by explaining the idea
of a differentiable manifold to his flatmate (So I asked Bindel
what a manifold was yesterday...
/ And I'll bet he told
you!
); and the guy who walked a mile (more?) with a red office
chair on his head was definitely just Dave.
If I have other nicknames, it's probably just as well that I don't know them.
- Currently drinking: Hot water, lime, and honey