Nomen"cluster" ...

When we were wee young things and Beloved Ex and I first met, there was a little problem with what to call him.  He was in a band, we met at a venue, and when he got off stage and chatted with me, he said his name was Denny James (it was the 80s, but even then I teased him for this – and the cheesiness of the stage name was very much intentional … as well as a dodge of his real surname, which is sumptuously Hungarian and, by American standards, needlessly filled with bewildering consonants).  When he gave me his phone number (even in the 80s, kids, a girl did the safe thing, and didn’t hand out her digits), he revised his name to Jim.  And explained that his actual name is Dennis James, but he never, ever went by Dennis.  Nor even Denny.  So Jim.

It was a bit of a trial by fire-by-any-other-name, but he was THAT cute, so I smiled something about my dad not using his first name either, and put his phone number away.

Then I called him, and – hesitantly – asked the lady who answered the phone (his grandmother) for Jim.

“Oh, you mean Jimmy??”

I failed to hang up ... but it was a close one.

When the man you end up marrying comes by something like eight possible epithets during the first five minutes of acquaintance, and one of his names is a forbidding serving of quite marvelous consonantal excess:  you gain something of a tolerance for naming conventions’ flexibility in a hurry.  (Eventually, you also hyphenate your last name, because as much as I actually quite LIKED my married surname, explaining it forever became exhausting in a hurry.  “Major is fine.  Just call me Diane Major.  It’s fine.  Really.”)



So for me to reach my fill line on variables with naming takes a bit of a pot-ful, and I have REACHED my limit on varying names for things at work.

It’s not so much an issue of “Do we call it Robert or Bob or Rob or Robbie or Bobby or Mack or Jack or Bill or Pubert?” as it is of the intricacies of reporting.

When delivering a complex piece of Excel year-over-year budget and performance data, it MATTERS – beyond belief, apparently, in the Wild West of “hey let’s set up this report” – whether a piece of information has extra words in it or not.  It MATTERS when someone teaches me, “I know the name looks like it should be Total X Blurp-de-Blurp, but what it really should be is Total LABOR X Blurp-de-Blurp - don’t use the one that just says TOTAL."

And so I use the Total Labor blurp-de-blurp column, and … well, now we have a whole herd of kittens to corral.  Because everybody’s having ‘em.

As to kitten herding, well.  I’m accustomed to different things!  At home, with Gossie being the wise and agreeable boy he is, I find it quite winsomely, if not hilariously, easy to herd cats.  Or cat, anyway.  He’s learned that if he doesn’t shoot out the bedroom door when mom’s done dressing, and (instead of scooping him or chasing him) stands behind him relative *to* said door, he’s liable to get locked in the bedroom, momma will forget him, and that means no pettin’s.  So he shoots out the door with little more than a positional hint, which is the perfect pet-person piece of successful communication.

See, because I’m not mucking up the message with my own personal spin.  I know what works for him, I “tell” him what he understands (positionally speaking), and he responds wonderfully, because he is a great little dude and he’s trained me right.  Everybody’s happy.

Meanwhile, Bobby or Roberta or whatever my column header’s names should be, end up being delivered wrong, because – well, we can’t change column headers to match the source data.  So Diane (or Artemis, perhaps, if you prefer the Greek) goes soft in the head inputting the wrong data, and nothing good gets done.

Fortunately for all, Diane (or Cynthia … or Selene … ?) is willing to bite a bullet and have a MEETING, if one miraculously becomes necessary (for the term meeting, my mental definition all but precludes this descriptor … but sometimes, you have to at least bring people together!).  And so, requests for translations and guidance and greater wisdom and experience have gone out.  Whatchawannabet the tree will bear fruit?  It’s early days yet (even at something like eight months now on my job!).  But I’m going to speak this vernacular yet, cuss its blessit and dark and impenetrable heart.