To think DH needs to tell his barber his real name?

NN = nickname

Thanks for this, what does NN stand for?

My mum met a lady walking their dog and built up a friendship my mum called this lady Molly, it turns out her name was Maureen and she didn’t correct her for years!

This is why my XH always uses generic names - mate, buddy etc for his clients.

My parents' neighbours call them Jane (her real name) and Jack (not his real name, not close). They didn't acknowledge it to start with because it was just Christmas cards and passing waves and things. It's now 20 years later. They socialise regularly, they've been on holiday together, my parents went to their daughter's wedding... invited as "Jane and Jack". Pretty much the whole village is in on not correcting them at this point.

I had a boss who used to call me Leslie. My name is Karen. 🤔 I eventually had to ask him why. It was after the actress Leslie Caron.

I’ve been called Charlotte at work for years. Even received emails addressing me as Charlotte even though my email contains my first name. I stopped correcting the perps because it was tiresome.

it’s become an amusement now.

my name is not similar except it starts with a C.

My late Mum was always called Kit, a nickname, but her real name was Anne.
Or so we thought, after she died we discovered it was actually Annie on her birth certificate. We found this quite odd as surely Annie is a nickname for Anne and not vice versa?
Meanwhile, God only knows where Kit came from.
(Her family had form for this, her brother, named Oliver, was called Doug and her sister Lucy was called Janey. They weren't middle names either )

I was convinced for years that one of my neighbours was called Steve. Put it in his xmas cards and everything. He’s actually called Dave. Mortifying. But if someone calls me the wrong name I literally cannot correct them. I’m too embarrassed!! So I suggest saying nothing or changing name by deed poll.

Our neighbour used to call dh Brian. His name is nowhere near Brian. We’d get Xmas cards to Brian and Bella. Then suddenly we started getting Xmas cards to Brian and Geraldine 😂So wrong for both of us.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Our NDN called DH a random name for quite a bit.

Oddly, it actually happened to be BIL name.

We decided the truly British solution would be for me to divorce DH and marry his brother, just to avoid awkwardness.

I used to go to a gym and one of the women there always called me Julie. I have no idea why. I kept thinking, today I will tell her my real name but I never found the courage!
I don’t go to that gym anymore and luckily haven’t seen her since.

Polly is a very long standing traditional NN for Mary, just as Peggy is for Margaret and Betsy for Elizabeth.

My dh plays a sport every week. For about 15 years, someone at the club referred to me by the wrong name. Not just a bit wrong - a completely different name!

My dh thought it was hilarious and would play up to it eg if the man asked how ‘Jane’ was, dh would say ‘oh yes, she’s great thanks’.

The man died about 10 years ago, still thinking by name was Jane.

My dh is a twat!

The thing I can think of it being a wartime/services thing. You didn't really make the grade unless you had a nickname and even the wives and girlfriends had nicknames. Their origins can be quite obscure but they only stick if you're a good'un.

Mary might have been known as Polly because she talked a lot, "Polly Parrot" in a very nice way. "Oh, pretty polly!" etc.

Still the same today.

Your great nan is CLASS.

Be grateful that it is just the barber, OP!

When my grandfather was admitted to hospital, we used to get suspicious looks for calling him the 'wrong' name. He used what was thought to be his middle name (R), but his otherwise unused first name (G) was what he was often registered under at the hospital. A nurse, who had known him all her life, saw G as a mistake and corrected it to R.

On finding his birth certificate in a stack of paperwork, it turned out that his middle name wasn't quite R.

This made registering his death very interesting, because some things were filed under his official first name, others (including his passport...) under his assumed middle name, and his birth certificate said another middle name altogether...

Mind you, many of his siblings used the wrong name, too. My mother didn't know that her uncle S was actually called T, and thought that she'd turned up at the wrong funeral because they were celebrating the life of J, not D...

I’m guessing he introduced himself as “Al”, short for Alistair and it for misheard as Carl

Her middle name, and the name she preferred?

We live around a green where everyone knows everyone (alhough not very well), and exchange Christmas cards etc. New neighbours moved in and DH got talking to them and came back and told me their names...the man was called Carl apparently.
At Christmas several of the other neighbours ask DH what the new neighbours were called, so he told them.

For years Christmas cards were sent, with Carl's name featuring on many cards to them.

His name was Alistair... we only found out after they moved out!

Years ago I knew someone called Mary who was known as Polly, it was not a unique pairing, other women called Mary were known as Polly, apparently at one point it was common for certain names to have alternative/nicknames associated with them: I will try to think of other examples but an obvious one is if someone had a surname of White, they would be known as Chalky. But other alternative/nicknames were nothing to do with the surname.
The woman I knew was probably born around 100 years ago (long deceased) so maybe it was a thing then....

This story is so beautifully sweet!

Our neighbour calls DH Alan. His name doesn't begin with an A. He's called him it for five years and DH signs his Christmas cards as Alan now. DH has just got some work shirts with his actual name on them, that's going to be confusing for our neighbour.

If you don't correct it straight off it just becomes to awkward and you have to go with it. I've been going to my brow lady for a few yrs now. She's Persian so there's a bit of lost in translation occasionally. She was asking me where I'm from and I said UK, she heard Ukraine, I tried to correct it but she didn't pick up on it. Now we have a brief convo every appointment about the situation in Ukraine It's gone on to long now to back out.