Question of the day.

What are/have been your nicknames, if any?

My answer:

Well, I’ve had a lot of them. Most importantly Bibiel, which y’all probably know about already. Before Bibiel, there was Bisbis, or Biśbiś in Polish spelling. It was Sofi who came up with both. When she was very little, and I was 10 or so, I used to listen a lot to Polish Radio BIS which no longer is a thing (BIS was the acronym for Bardzo Inna Stacja –
Very Different Station – it was a radio station aimed at young people, with a lot of “weird” music like alternative, reggae, hip-hop, folk, what not… they also had a lot of educational programmes for example for learning languages). I really liked this station and I really liked the word Bis (pronounced like bees but with s in the end, not z, so that it rhymes with peace). I made tons of neologisms using it, with the word Bis itself in my “language” meaning either any child of any age, or anyone who was, to put it briefly, more or less cool and I liked them so that they deserved being a Bis. Naturally then, I often called Sofi Bis and I couldn’t wait for her to be able to speak so that she’d learn to say the word Bis. 😀 She quickly picked it up and associated the word Bis with me, so that when she started to say her first words and using different words to refer to all of us in the family, she started calling me Biśbiś (most children raised with Polish will say ś instead of s as they learn to speak, ś is like the English sh but a little bit softer). I considered it really funny and cool and it stuck for a really long time. Then I started using Bisbis as my username online so some other people started calling me that too, and even I started talking about myself in the third person as Biśbiś, when I felt like doing so, and later Bibiel, as you know. I’d already had a tendency for referring to myself in the third person sometimes, but not all the time, just when I sort of felt like it sounded better for whatever reason. Then when Sofi was older, and saying Biśbiś all the time felt childish and sometimes a bit of a mouthful (she said it like Bibiś most of the time anyway and so did I), she started contracting it to Bib (kinda like you’d say beep in English 😀 ). We considered it super funny at the time. We both always make up a lot of words and nicknames for each other spontaneously (and now for Misha too), so a lot of other things have also evolved from both Biśbiś and Bib, but they didn’t stuck quite as much. And when she was already going to school, she, spontaneously as always, came up with Bibiel. I didn’t like it at first ’cause it sounded almost like Bieber or something like that but then I ended up liking it a lot and started using it myself. And I still do. I tried to use Bibielka in Polish or Bibielle in English ’cause that sounds more feminine but somehow it never stuck permanently, but I still sometimes spell it Bibielle and sometimes Bibiel, however I fancy really, it’s not a real word so who needs a fixed spelling rule. My Dad also calls me Bibiel, and other people when they feel like it.

Some people also called me Bisia before, mostly at school, which is an actual name, or rather an actual diminutive from names like Sabina or Balbina or Bibianna (there’s even an Arabella in the book series by Małgorzata Musierowicz who goes by Bisia sometimes), for me though, obviously it was to do with the Bis thing.

I also had a lot of other nicknames along the way that I either wanted people to call me or people called me spontaneously, and an absolute load of nicknames that Sofi has come up with, not all necessarily being variations on the Bis/Bib theme.

As for nicknames coming from my name, typically people nickname it to Emilka because that seems to be the most default Polish nickname of Emilia. Only my parents don’t particularly like it, my Mum because she had a hard time getting used to it at the beginning when I changed my name and then she said it’s too “farting sweet” (farting sweet in my Mum’s terminology means that something is too sweet to bear), so she prefers to call me Emi or Mila or Milka and sometimes Emisia (which I think is actually even more sweet but okay, I don’t mind either way). You may or may not know that, since I’ve got Misha, I often use the name Emisha online ’cause it sounds like a legit name and it’s a fun combination. It was my Mum who originally came up with that and now when she knows that Misha and me are together she’ll call us “Emisha!”. My Dad doesn’t like Emilka because he says it sounds like e-Milka, as if there was such a thing as an electronic Milka, the chocolate. I think he prefers to call me Bibiel because he hasn’t fully accepted my name change, or rather, can’t wrap his mind around why I’d even want to do so. He usually also calls me Emi when he doesn’t call me Bibiel, but sometimes he also calls me Emil kinda sarcastically which is both funny and annoying. Some English-speaking peeps have called me Millie and Jacek from Helsinki called me Milla most often. And one of my penfriends calls me Milzie sometimes.

My Dad is another person who always has loads of nicknames for people, most of them don’t really mean anything specific or sometimes they’re vaguely inspired by Kashubian words or something like that, and if you doon’t know him, often from the sound of these creations you could assume that they are actually insults. 😀

And my grandad sometimes calls me X-ray because of my apparent skills at “reading” people.

And, of course, I’d had several nicknames that people called me back when I still used my birth name, but since I don’t share my birth name on here, I won’t say the nicknames either.

So yeah, I guess that’s it.

How about you? 🙂

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