nicknames

I have an elaborate, polysyllabic given name that lends itself to nicknames. The nickname I grew up with essentially from birth can be compressed further. So if my given name was "Shortencia Q. Geologist III", I grew up as a "Shorty" and some people call me "Short". I'll answer to Shorty or Short, and as long as I'm not trying to be overly professional (i.e. at a job interview or a pre-bid meeting) I tell people to call me Shorty.

I've noticed that people from a working-class background (whether or not they now have white-collar jobs) will call me Short, while folks from a privileged background (and male supervisors) never call me anything other than Shorty. For comparison, I consider myself to be from a middle to upper middle class background. Drillers always call me Short. There's some interesting sociological interaction going on with nickname selection.

Incidentally, you know how if you use a particular word too much, it starts to look really silly? Yeah.

Anyway, nobody has ever called me Shortencia within about a half hour of interaction, with one exception. I was working in a team with several other scientists, all male, from the deep south. For the entire time we worked together, they would call me nothing except Shortencia. A couple days in, it started to feel really strange, but then I felt sort of silly making a big issue of it at that point. I got the definite sense that they were using my elaborate name as a way to separate themselves from me. They certainly didn't have any problem giving anybody else a nickname.

Before that point, I'd never considered a female scientist to be unusual. Both my parents are scientists, and in college, grad school, and the offices I worked in, there was a roughly equal number of males and females. This was the first time I was made to feel different because I was a female scientist. There was more to this than just how I was addressed (making it clear the use of my given name did not indicate respect), but it was the refusal to use a nickname that really made me feel out of place.