I’ve been accused over the years of being slightly over protective, something that I can’t deny overly vehemently, and while observing their interactions I noticed an interesting thing. Instead of using her given name the boyfriend referred to her as “Sage”, the name that she had always used for her social media accounts and some of the other Internet shenanigans that she used to get into.
It’s not totally weird to me. When I was a kid we all had our “code names”. I never wanted to be a naval aviator per se but had no problem calling them our “call signs” after Top Gun came out. Way before Prince changed his name to a symbol I tried to be known by the numbers 0069, a mashup of my love for old James Bond movies and something else that shouldn’t be hard to figure out. When that didn’t really catch on I started trying to go by “Speedy.”
For anybody that isn’t a complete comics nerd, Speedy was originally the teen sidekick to Green Arrow, kind of like Batman’s Robin, his best friend over the years. Without getting too off track, Speedy has been a very interesting character over the years, the sort of secondary hero that writers are allowed to play with a little bit. It was also around the same time that I spent my weekends going really fast around a roller skating rink so there was that double connotation. Sometimes it amazes me that I was able to get any girls to speak to me at all.
The youngest and her friends have taken this to a whole new level. Not only do they all have second names that they go by but none of them use any pronouns for each other besides they/them. As far as I can tell it’s not a gender identification issue or a rebuke of their given names. This generation just seems determined to rebel against any kind of labels or attempts to put them in any sort of box. I was just a weird kid that tried and failed at pretending to be cool. They wear “weird” as a badge of honor, something purposefully done in the pursuit of inclusiveness.
It’s both inspiring and confusing. Some of the names, such as Rey and GiGi, sound like actual names. My kid is known to all of her friends as Rowe. Another one is Dipper. As ridiculous as those sound, a quick look at any class list and they fit right in. There have been times when I’ve arrived at the school pick up line not only not completely sure which of her friends is coming home with us but how many. She’s come out of her room and told me “they” are getting hungry and I wonder if there are more girls in my house than I am aware of.
It’s also harmless. I don’t know if they are being uber “woke” or just a bunch of kids making up names for each other but I’m certainly not one to judge. Not realizing that there was a new connotation to the term I’ve spent the last eight years being known on the Internet as “Thirsty Daddy.” I would probably have been better off just sticking with “0069.”
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Previously Published on thirstydaddy.com and is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
