I do not usually have a fear that my friends will change, in whatever facets they may. Change is just an inevitable, wonderful part of getting older. There is, however, one exception: I have recently developed a fear that my friend Will, whom I have known since middle school, will eventually become a Bill, and as such, I will have to refer to my friend Will as "Bill." This fear has led me to realize that I don't know much about the machinations of the William Nickname League.
My family only ever uses my English name in the third person, so any nicknames on Kathryn in my life have arisen out of some sort of contrivance with my friends. As a side effect, you can figure out when and how someone came to know me by how they refer to me. Will, like Kate or Joe, can be a given name but generally is a nickname—specifically a hypocoristic, a shortened form without a diminutive suffix (-ie or y or whatever). How does one become a Will from, presumably, William? (I think about names a normal amount.)
"I think Will was more or less given to me," my friend Will, or William, told me. "My parents used it interchangeably. But at this point, I tell people to use Will because really only people close to me use William if I'm in in trouble or something."
I asked Will if he had any future plans to become a William or a Bill. Admittedly this was clumsy phrasing on my part. "I guess I sort of am a William, already," he said, which is true. But he established, a bit noncommittally, that while he might eventually make the transition to William—"When I'm older, like 30s or something"—he had no intentions of ever introducing himself as Billiam, though he responds to it, or Bill, which was what his grandfather and eponym primarily went by.
With this huge sample size of one, I developed a theory of Williams. Some Williams, I theorized, existed on the Willy/Will/William side of the Great William Divide; others existed on the Billy/Bill side. While a Will may become a William, he was not likely to become a Bill.
To try to confirm this theory and also extend my sample size to two interviewees, I spoke to the only member of the Billy/Bill division I knew: Defector's Billy Haisley. Like my friend Will, Billy is named after another member of the family, and his parents selected his diminutive. But unlike my friend Will, the process of nickname transition was formalized within Billy's family.
"I am actually William A. Haisley III, and in fact the fourth William Haisley, so my path to Billydom was already well trod when I was born," Billy said. "As is custom, my parents called me Billy when I was a baby, so that was what I was always used to being called. As is also custom, the expectation was always that I would one day transition from Billy to Bill when the time came."
And just like that, the sample size of two Williams suddenly became a sample size of five. Billy's dad, Bill Haisley, made the change from Billy to Bill toward the end of high school. But Billy, as you might have gathered, is still Billy.
"I never felt very comfortable with the idea of going by something different," Billy told me. "And—sorry to do an earnest, 'please, X is my father's name. call me Y' meme—as I got older I realized that Bill was so solidly in my mind the name of my dad and grandpa, who along with not being literally me were also two old white guys, that I decided to just stick with Billy for good. I think in a sort of subtle attempt to guide me to Billdom, my dad and grandpa did start calling me Bill with some frequency at a certain point in my later teens, but by then I was already resolved to be one of those admittedly embarrassing adult Billys. I shan't be changing it now."
So there you have it. Nicknames, like normal names, exist on an odd balance of assignment—they are literally given names—and self-selection. The branching paths from "William" are perhaps the most extreme example of this.* But more importantly, no Will or Billy I know will ever become a Bill. And that is good enough for me.
*Let's reconvene when Defector eventually has a Dolores Week.
