{"id":8521,"date":"2014-01-15T10:14:40","date_gmt":"2014-01-15T14:14:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/?p=8521"},"modified":"2014-01-15T10:24:10","modified_gmt":"2014-01-15T14:24:10","slug":"baby-naming-issue-using-the-nickname-huck-for-hugo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/2014\/01\/15\/baby-naming-issue-using-the-nickname-huck-for-hugo\/","title":{"rendered":"Baby Naming Issue: Using the Nickname Huck for Hugo"},"content":{"rendered":"

Audra writes:<\/p>\n

I’m expecting a boy any day now and we have decided to name him Hugo. (A special and significant name to us for many reasons!) The plan has been for his middle name to be James after my Granddad.<\/p>\n

Recently though, we’ve brought the name Huck to the table. We love literary names but in the end didn’t like Huckleberry or even Huxley as longer name options. Huck doesn’t seem to stand as well to me on it’s own for an adult. (also the unfortunate rhyming word with it.)<\/p>\n

Is Huck an acceptable nickname for Hugo or does it seem far fetched? I personally don’t feel the need to shorten a name I love and find short and sweet as is, but my husband says he’d like to call him Huck.<\/p>\n

And with that being said, should we consider changing the middle name to something like Jack (another family name) to maybe make the nickname make more sense? Hugo James (Huck) or Hugo Jack (Huck)<\/p>\n

Thank you so much in advance!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

We had a similar question yesterday, about using the nickname Jack for James<\/a>. Using Huck as a nickname for Hugo is like using Kate as a nickname for Kara, or Madd as a nickname for Mark: you can certainly do it, but I wouldn’t even try to make it make sense. I would just brazen it out: you want to call him Huck sometimes, so you’re calling him Huck sometimes. We call my daughter Elizabeth St. Claire, Elizabeth Louise, and Elizabeth Marie—and NONE of those are her name. One of my sons went by a nickname the equivalent of P.J. (where only the second initial was part of his actual name), and he chose to use it even at preschool. There were occasional confusions with other parents if I used his actual first name instead of his nickname, and people often asked where the nickname came from, but it was no big deal.<\/p>\n

I wouldn’t change the honor name just to try to make the nickname make sense: I don’t think it helps enough to be worth it. If I were you, I would start by naming him Hugo James as you originally decided, and then have your husband go ahead and call him Huck if he wants to. If it sticks, you can move on to the decision about whether to have other people use it as well. Plenty of children have nicknames that are unrelated to their given names; in this case the easy explanation would be something like “That was his dad’s pet name for him as a baby, and it just stuck!” I think that will make more sense to people than “His middle name is Jack, so it’s kind of like Hu- from the first name and -ck from his middle name.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Audra writes: I’m expecting a boy any day now and we have decided to name him Hugo. (A special and significant name to us for many reasons!) The plan has been for his middle name to be James after my Granddad. Recently though, we’ve brought the name Huck to the table. We love literary names […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-2dr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8521"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8527,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8521\/revisions\/8527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}