Bob Wertz

I realized the other day that our family tends to give places nicknames and that to an outside observer, our place names would be undecodable. Here are a few of my favorites.

• St. Mary Ashley. In reality, this church is St. Mary Episcopal Church, but our former babysitter, Mary Ashley got married here. It’s on my drive home and when my wife would ask where I was, I’d say “I’m by St. Mary, you know, where Mary Ashley got married.” Eventually, I shortened it to St. Mary Ashley.
• The Honeybaked Ham Plant. Not far past St. Mary Ashley is sprawling industrial facility. Once owned by Honeywell, it’s now operated by Shaw Industries and makes carpet fibers.¹ It obviously does not “make” hams, but I guess at some point, Honeywell became Honeybaked. If I told my wife I was near the Shaw Industries plant, she’d have no idea where I was.
• The Ballerina Gas Station. It’s in Ballentine, South Carolina and when Norah was very little, she misunderstood where we were stopping to fill up. It stuck.(I found out recently that at least one of my kids thought it was really called the Ballerina Gas Station.)
• All the Starbucks. We have nicknames for all of our frequent Starbucks stops. “Neighborhood Starbucks” is by our house and is a typical new Starbucks. “Grad School Starbucks” is where I did all my grad school studying when I first went back to school. It was the closest to our house until Neighborhood Starbucks was built. It is also an icebox so it’s important to let the kids know if we are going to Grad School Starbucks because they will need a sweatshirt. “Ballerina Starbucks” is in Ballentine, obviously. (See above.) A Starbucks without a nickname is a Starbucks that we don’t visit.²

There are others. Are we the only family that does this? Or does your family have informal names for places that you visit?

Bob Wertz is a type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.