The name game
As many of our friends know, Jannine and I are affectionately known in shorthand as Jannate. It’s more efficient than pronouncing all the many syllables in our names, plus that pesky “and”. (The ending of this sentence introduces one of the formal usage rules that I constantly fight with in my head. Technically, I believe, the period should be inside the closing quotation mark. However, that makes no sense to me, as the quotation marks are only related to the and. It seems like a non-traditional use of the quotation mark, which should allow the period to be placed in a non-traditional location. Which I did. Sue me, grammar police!)
Anyway, the “couple names” started with our friends Jeremy and Erica, aka Jerica, and spread to us, Zane and Angela (Zangela) and Stefan and Aneta (Stefeta or Stefaneta — there is debate about the proper contraction).
I was thinking about all this today, and that made me think about how Kat and Suz started using J9 as a nickname for Jannine. I then realized that my name could be shortened to N8. Which would make us N8 & J9. How cool is that??
Do not write a comment telling me that it’s not cool. I have decided that it is cool, and that’s all there is to it.
April 7th, 2007 at 9:01 pm
N8 is cool.. but THONG is BETTER!
the history:
Nathan
Na-thon
Na-thong
Thong!
April 7th, 2007 at 10:14 pm
so then would jannate be condensed to jn8? jan8? ooohhh…. that should be ur anniversary date!!! =)
April 10th, 2007 at 12:05 am
Oh, Honey, this is just one of a myriad of reasons I’m marrying you. I laughed out loud for, like, 30 seconds straight.
April 16th, 2007 at 10:11 am
I only put the period inside the quotes if the thing inside the quotes is actual quote or a complete sentence. Though I would tend to use quotes around the “and”, I think the technically correct thing to do would be to use italics.
I find Stefeta easier to say, but Stefaneta has added coolness because it has both our names inside it. The only downside is that it saves you only two syllables, two inter-word pauses, and has 1 fewer stressed syllable.
In programming, we often shorted the work internationalization to i18l, because there are 18 letters between the i and the l. As a result people sometimes say “I eighteen N” instead of internationalization. When I saw N8, my first thought was you don’t have 9 letters in your name, but I did think that N14e would be a cool alternative to Jannate.
April 16th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
this quote quite possibly sets the high-water mark for both coolness and geekiness with regards to (or WRT, as we attorneys would say) comments on my blog.
Stefan, any time you want to write a guest post, just let me know.
May 3rd, 2007 at 11:27 pm
Wow - how did i miss THIS whole post? Yeek! The perfect time to comment and i am light years behind!
I think you have the most nicknames of the people i know.
N8 + J9 = awesome, and by that i mean totally sweeeeeeet
Thong = very cool
Mr. Tong = very, well, Chinese
SWAS = you can decide whether you like that one or not!
And as for the quotation, I once had to hunt down the answer to that question. I found through my oh-so-accurate sources that the old way of doing things was the period inside the quotation but it has become increasingly popular to put the punctuation outside the quote, especially if it’s a question and there is a quote embedded in the question at the end. (i.e. Did he really just say, “Call me SWAS”?) So in the end, i think that both are considered right.