Extracts of this post were taken from Cool Names and Cool Kids

I don’t have a nickname and it was a such a source of irritation for me for the longest time. In fact, I was embarrassed by my whole name. My parents must have got bored when it came to naming me. I was the fourth of four kids in four years for our Mam, and I genuinely think she couldn’t be bothered any more. ‘Just call him Paul. That’ll do.’

I would get teased with Paul McCartney at school, or Carnation Cream. Hardly the height of gangsta chic. In the UK, we don’t like any words longer than two syllables long, so we shorten everything and add a Y,(E) an A, or an O at the end. So names become Stevo, Tommo, Tommy, or Macka. The fact that I had a Y at the end of my (two-syllable) name meant that I never got a nickname. I was born with one. How boring! I wanted a cool nickname. If I had a cool nickname, I could be a cool kid. So, I used to invent nicknames I thought were cool and suggest them to the other kids. 

‘Hey, why don’t you start calling me Chilli? Like Chilli Con Carne. Get it? Chilli Con Carney. Oh God, I’m so funny aren’t I? Yeah, Chilli, that’s me.’

‘Shut up Carnation Cream, you stupid puff.’

This was England in the 70s. No one had heard of Chilli Con Carne, up north, back then. I was well read and dull. I was brainy and boring, and I had the semolina of nicknames. Usually, I was reduced to just being called Carney, and I found that so annoying. 

Humans are weird aren’t we? We don’t choose our name, we are given it, but then we spend forever trying to reinvent our name to be something it’s not. Maybe we should be content with the name we have, and learn its history. For example, the name Carney has a long Gaelic heritage. The original Gaelic form of the name Carney is said to be Ó Cearnaigh, from the word “cearnach,” which means “victorious.”

One part of my family came from Killarney in Ireland in the 19th century, to Teesside, to look for work in the foundries. They spelled their name as Kearney until the 1904 census, when they began using Carney. This was probably because of persecution from the native Protestant English who disliked Irish immigrants such as the Kearney’s of Killarney.

The name Carney has proud roots therefore. I just wish I’d been taught that when I was a child. It could have saved me an awful lot of anguish. I didn’t have to try to invent a cool nickname, I was born with one.