My cousin Stephen once told me a story from the time he lived in California, about a conversation he had with a young man from Los Angeles, who kept calling him “dude”. After several minutes of conversation, they reached a turning point:
The Dude: So, like, what’s your name, dude?
Stephen: It’s Stephen.
The Dude: All right, Steve, great. Now I don’t have to call you “dude” anymore!
This is funny for all sorts of reasons, but what I’d like to point out is the immediate switch from “Stephen” to “Steve” on the part of The Dude. I have not one, but two cousins named Stephen, and both of them go by Stephen, not Steve. I also know a bunch of people named Michael who go by Michael, not Mike, and some named Richard who go by Richard, not Rich, Dick, or what-have-you. And so on. It’s not that uncommon for people to resist being saddled with common nicknames.
But woe to the poor sod whose name is Gregory but does not like the name Greg. The use of Greg as a shortened form is so well established, at least in the United States, that there are even some poor saps with the name Gregg, whose parents tossed in an extra G as a sort of apology for giving them such a lame and stunted name.
People often ask me whether I prefer being called Gregory or Greg, and I invariably tell them that I prefer Gregory. What they think of this, they never say, but they then gamely go on to call me Gregory, which I appreciate. The problem is that these people are in the minority. The rest of the people I meet fall into one of two groups: (a) those who are savvy enough to pick up on the fact that I go by Gregory, and (b) those who assume that nobody would be crazy enough to buck the majority and go by a three-syllable name when there is a perfectly good one-syllable nickname ready, even if it sounds like a noise made by a frog.
I meet a lot of people who are native speakers of English, and a lot of people who are non-native speakers (or non-speakers) of English. What I find really interesting is that the former usually fall into category (a) above, and the latter usually fall into category (b). In other words, the worst offenders in terms of calling me Greg are the people who have learned English as a second language. It’s as though they’ve learned a grammatical rule:
Gregory → Greg (in all contexts)
And in a sense, that’s what they’ve done. They’ve probably never encounted anyone who goes by Gregory, and they’ve overgeneralized. But it’s a bit like me assuming that everyone named Francisco wants to be called Paco, or that everyone named Rolf wants to be called Roffe. So I find it a bit mystifying. I buttonholed a Spanish friend of mine not long ago and asked about this, and she suggested that calling me Greg seems like a form of endearment, a way of being chummy. But it has certainly never seemed that way to me. That would require a form like Greggles or Greggy-Weggy, which, thank the lord, nobody every tries to use, perhaps because they sense that I would immediately karate-chop them. If you want to endear yourself to me, try buying me a beer instead.
For the record, I was mostly called Greg when I was a child, but I never liked it. So in 1988 I started asking people to call me Gregory, with varying degrees of success. So now, for more than half my life, I have been called Gregory. My wife has certainly never called me anything else, or at least nothing I would print here. My mother calls me Gregory. And you can too! Even if you think deep down that there’s something snobbish about not wanting to accept a “perfectly good” nickname, you can take comfort in the fact that it will make me happy. I give special dispensation to a handful of people who have known me as Greg for many years, but you would know it if you were one of those people. Otherwise, I certainly won’t stop you from calling me Greg, but then you should be prepared for me to call you Scooter. Or perhaps just “dude”.