Pet name? Pet peeve, more like

If ever anyone enquires about why I have a preposterous email address, I tend to blame Rebecca Lowe, now Head of PR & Social Media for Original Travel. When we worked together at Travel PR, back in my former life, she called me ‘Ricardo’ — at exactly the time I decided to transition from Hotmail to this then-hip, indie-cool thing called Gmail. Feeling that my pasty-faced self could decidedly benefit from an exotic Latin reinvention, I adopted the nickname.

I could update my email account, of course, so it’s not really Rebecca’s fault. But, though the address is really quite cringe, it does occasionally serve a useful purpose as a filter: any time I receive an email beginning “Hi Ricardo”, I know the sender hasn’t put any time into researching me and that the email is less likely to be personally useful.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that I’ve been thinking about nicknames, pet names and the like. It always strikes me as weird when people with whom I am not chummy call me Rich, or Rick (Dick is another matter entirely — I treat that as an adjective of unfortunate accuracy. Rupert represents a whole other trauma, as long-time readers might remember.)

Selina Jones from Scott & Co calls me Rich, but she is allowed to as she doubles as a dear friend. Becca, still a pal, still uses Ricardo, as sometimes does Amelia Bird, another former work colleague and also a beloved mucker. But when others whom I only know professionally suddenly adopt such a moniker, it strikes the wrong note — it seems overfamiliar, slightly icky and a bit like trying to speed up a relationship unnaturally. (Ditto, while we’re at it, when a non-friend PR contacts me on WhatsApp out of the blue.)

Does it mean I won’t consider their pitch / late deal / whatever? Not at all: the readers come first. But am I subconsciously, unknowingly a tad prejudiced and put off? Very possibly.

Most likely I need, paraphrasing Vince Vaughn in The Wedding Crashers, to have some real problems. All the same, anyone who doesn’t know me that well is definitely better off using email, and using Richard. Or maybe Dick.