Tag: Red Beans and Rice

Thousands of unique, undocumented family nicknames are born every day. However, dozens of the most common, traditional English first names used today exist entirely because of historical childhood speech limits or toddler mispronunciations. That’s because when children learn to talk, their mouths struggle with hard consonant clusters. This leads to a linguistic process called “reduplication” (repeating syllables) or consonant swapping to make words easier to say. Over centuries, these toddler-friendly versions became standard legal names. My sister Dolores acquired one such nickname. When my brother George couldn’t pronounce “Dolores,” he began calling her Lorlie–not “Lolo” as you might expect. Even…