{"id":3399,"date":"2009-12-15T07:55:41","date_gmt":"2009-12-15T12:55:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/?p=3399"},"modified":"2009-12-15T07:55:41","modified_gmt":"2009-12-15T12:55:41","slug":"dani-or-danielle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/2009\/12\/15\/dani-or-danielle\/","title":{"rendered":"Dani or Danielle"},"content":{"rendered":"

M<\/span>y mother named me Danielle Monique. The joke was that if my father had gotten to the birth certificate form first, I would have been Monique Danielle. I’m not sure I ever asked where Monique came from, but Danielle was from a book my mom read when she was a teenager. In fact, Danielle was such a rare name in my anglo southern Ontario town in the early 1970s that a neighbour of my grandmother named her daughter Danielle after hearing my grandmother call it out for me. My folks went to Paris when I was 10 or 11 and I still have the necklace pendant they brought back for me — the first time I’d ever seen any kind of name souvenir with Danielle written on it. Of course, now that I live in the bilingual national capital, there’s a lot more Danielles around.<\/p>\n

When I was 12, I was desperately in need of a reinvention. I’d changed schools, and wanted an even fresher start, so I started calling myself Dani. It was my dad who first called me that, but by high school just about everyone — except my mother — did. I’ve used Danielle professionally through the years, using the longer name formally and Dani informally. All my documents say Danielle, but just about everyone — except my mother — still calls me Dani. <\/p>\n

As you can see, I’ve made quite the online brand for myself as DaniGirl. It was my friend Heather who first called me that, in my early 20s. And Beloved calls me DaniGirl, too. It still makes me smile.<\/p>\n

As I’ve become a woman of a (cough) certain age, I’ve wondered whether the undeniably perky name Dani still suits me. When I changed jobs last month, I introduced myself as Danielle. Seems more, um, managerial than Dani. And it took about two e-mails before I was signing off as Dani, if nothing else because it saves me four keystrokes each time! Beloved and I were invited out to a social gathering on the weekend with some of my new colleagues, and it resonated in my ears when they called me Danielle. I introduced myself to strangers at the party as Dani. It’s habit now.<\/p>\n

Names have been an interesting challenge for me throughout my life. When I got married at 20, my “practice” marriage, I took his name, even though it was so French that my little anglo tongue had to practice it for ages to get it right. And long before I knew we were headed for splitsville, I’d asked him if it would be okay for me to go back to using my maiden name. I felt lost without it. And through sheer stubbornness, I’ve saddled the boys with a mouthful of hyphenated surnames for which I’m sure they will curse me in years to come. <\/p>\n

Care to add to this rather pointless ramble on names? Have you moved from Susan to Susie to Sue through the years? Decided that Becky was better than Rebecca? Were horrified when someone truncated your name and it stuck? Do you correct people when they call you Pat instead of Patricia? (It still gets my back up when people call me Dan. I know it’s dangerous to admit this to some of you, who will forevermore call me exactly that, but it really does grate when I hear it!)<\/p>\n

***<\/div>\n

A propos of nothing at all — no, wait, I can make a segue out of this: Speaking of names, I’d love to be named <\/em>the Best Family Blog <\/a>in the Canadian Blog Awards! (Aw, c’mon, it’s not bad!) You can vote for me today and every day this week! Instructions are here<\/a>, or you can just click through to the voting form<\/a> and wing it — just don’t forget to press the “vote” button at the bottom and the “confirm” button on the next screen! And thanks!! \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My mother named me Danielle Monique. The joke was that if my father had gotten to the birth certificate form first, I would have been Monique Danielle. I’m not sure I ever asked where Monique came from, but Danielle was from a book my mom read when she was a teenager. In fact, Danielle was … Continue reading “Dani or Danielle”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-it-is-all-about-me"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3399"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3400,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3399\/revisions\/3400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}