My name is Patrick. Don’t you dare call me Pat

There were many factors that meant I was never going to be destined for great popularity in my first year of Australian high school – I was very short and had a very plummy British accent, very wet eyes and an objectively very “gay walk”. I was like a tiny little anachronistic aristocrat, transported into a beachside town with the express purpose of having oranges thrown at me. But beyond all these hurdles, I still remember the moment when I truly shot myself in the foot and set myself up for six years of social shunning: the moment I rejected my Aussie nickname.

“Oy, Lentil,” said some long-forgotten kid, and like an alien, I corrected him. “Lenton”.

A rookie error. A foolish mistake. The beginning of the end.

Lentil, pictured. Credit: Jesse Graham

I watched the confusion cross his face. You see, one of the rules of Aussie nickname culture, which I’d never learned, was that if you try to reject a nickname, then it becomes forced upon you, almost as an insult. I was supremely unbothered by being referred to as a legume, as many of my peers were lumped with nicknames based on completely unprintable slurs, so I got off lightly. But if I’d just gone with it, perhaps I would have assimilated into Australian high school culture.

It wasn’t my only attempted nickname, and therefore not my only mistake: I’ve rejected Patty, Pat, Patto and even a “Patagonia” (when I turned up to school camp wearing hiking boots). But each time I shut the chance of a nickname down, even after I was aware of the social blacklisting I was voluntarily signing myself up to. Pat, of course, is the most common one – people will reach for the diminutive of my name on instinct. In most jobs I’ve ever had, I’ve had to stare down my boss and tell them “actually, it’s Patrick”, and feel the promotion ebb from the room like blood from an artery.

The default nickname formula in Australia is shortening a name down to one syllable and then adding an “o”. You can also add an “sy” to many last names, especially if that person is a good-natured larrikin. Brooks becomes Brooksy. There are several other popular styles, which at best could be described as “observational humour”, like calling someone Canary because of the one time they wore a yellow jumper.

Part of my dislike of any diminutive of Patrick is that my beloved grandma was named Patricia, or Patsy, or often, Pat. My mum didn’t realise that we could end up with essentially the same name because, in her defence, she’d always called her Mum. I was almost named Miles, which wouldn’t have done me any more favours on the coolness factor, but also couldn’t be easily shortened into a nickname (although I once knew someone named Miles who was often called “Milo”). The reason I didn’t get named Miles was because my dad did manage to shorten it, and referred to me as Little Kilometre the entire time my mum was pregnant with me. “Not long to go now,” he’d say, which drove her mad enough to change my name entirely. That hatred of nicknames must have seeped into me amniotically.

It’s the laziness that gets me. The idea that three syllables are a syllable too hard, let alone the horror of four. It’s weird that the prime minister is referred to, in the media, as Albo, the slight ethnic origin of Albanese apparently too hard for an entire country to commit to.

It’s the unoriginality that stems from such laziness. I remember a kid I met once who introduced himself with his own nickname – Fatty. And it wasn’t like those World War II-era ironic juxtaposition names, where a really tall person would be nicknamed Tiny. It was just a lazy descriptor, like a toddler pointing at things out of a car window.

The only concession I’ll make to my disdain of nickname culture is when they’re weird, sly jokes, such as the recursive pun of the name Aladdin for someone named Matt Ryder. Or when there’s such a long string of absurd connections before you get to “Froggy” that it requires a story told over a schooner to understand.

While people being more original and daring would fix my hatred of nicknames, I’m reminded of my friends who met at an all-girls school and found an excess of Lauras in their group. One Laura got to use her real name and one Laura got to use her last name.

The final Laura got saddled with a nickname based off her fear of contracting meningococcal from kissing, which involved an accidental shortening of the disease into a truly filthy slang word. They had of course never heard of this word, being at an all-girls school and not being Scottish sailors – and they used it all through their teen years. But here’s the thing - that nickname is still used to this day, because nicknames stick.