I guess I'll combine a bunch of the content-generator questions. . .

So, there have been a bunch of question-generation-questions floating around that people have been posting.

So, I'll just do them all at once.
1. Anything you want to tell me anonymously? Feel free. I don't disable anonymous comments, nor do I track IPs.
2. Any really basic questions about me that you want to know? I mean, we all start reading LJs "in media res" as it were, and so there may be totally basic stuff about me that you don't know that you want to know. Feel free to ask them.
3. Anything that you want me to blog about that I don't usually blog about? Feel free to ask.

Actually, feel free to do any of these things any time you want. In general, it's not IMPOSSIBLE to offend me, but it's hard to do accidentally. Feel free to ask questions or make comments or whatever -- I'm hard to offend, and, when I DO get offended, I usually just explain why, and talk about it, and then forgive and make up once everything's cleared up.

Oh -- I don't guarantee answers to anything. I'll usually answer most questions that don't involve other people's privacy, but not always.

So, I finally got around to asking my maternal grandfather something I'd been vaguely wondering

So, if you want to look up my grandfather in dental journals or whatever, his name is Dr Norman Becker. No middle name -- his family was too poor to afford one, or even an initial (Harry S Truman, of course, came from a family that could only afford the "S", but no name to go along with it).

The folks at his office call him "Dr Becker" if there's no chance of confusion, but usually call him "Dr Norman", in order to distinguish him from Dr David Becker, and Dr Todd Belf-Becker, his son and grandson respectively. (Is my grandfather a happy man? He loves dentistry, loves teaching about dentistry, and works with his son and grandson, whom he loves, and who also love dentistry.) Folks who he knows through the dental community call him "Norman" or "Norm".

But his family and close friends call him "Tuny." He's "Papa Tuny" to me, my sister, and all of our cousins. So, tonight, I asked Papa if he got his nickname after Gene Tunney, the heavyweight boxing champion from 1926-28 (and one of the greatest boxers of all time). He laughed and said that, no, he didn't, but he DID have the nickname when he was a small child not long after Tunney was the champ.

No, actually his nickname is because his name is Naphtali. As well as Norman. Like most Jews of his generation, really like most children-of-immigrants of his generation, he had a name, and an English version of the name, which he used in different contexts. So, his mother called him "Naphtali." Or "Naphtaleleh." Because, in Yiddish, to make a pet name, you add "eleh" to the end.

His childhood playmates had trouble with "Naphtaleleh", and came out with something closer to "Naphtaneleh", which morphed into "Taneleh", then "Taneh", then "Tuny". And that's what everybody's called him since his was in single digits.

But I don't think he really minds the connection to Gene Tunney . . . .