By Reginal Campbell · October 7, 2026 · 8-minute read
A Case for Nicknames
Your given name identifies you. The name you answer to may say more about who you became.
Ask me my name and the honest answer is a question back: who’s asking, and why? The government says Reginal. So do my driver’s license, my passport, my mortgage paperwork, and every doctor’s office that has ever read it off a clipboard across a waiting room.
The people who have known me longest say Soup. Friends, family, and even colleagues. That’s me. In corporate rooms, I answer to Reggie.
One of those names was assigned before anyone knew who I would become. The other accumulated meaning over decades, in front of people who watched me become him. By my count, I answer to at least seven names. The government recognizes one of them. I’m no longer sure it’s the real one.
Named before the story
A given name is assigned at the exact moment the least is known about you. Your parents chose it before you had a personality, a temperament, a single friend, or a single failure. Sometimes it honors a relative. Sometimes it carries a hope. Sometimes it was simply the name that won the argument. That isn’t a criticism of parents. Someone has to fill in the form, and they usually do it with love. But a birth name is, at bottom, a forecast. It is a label applied before there is any data.
The name you answer to usually arrives after there is evidence, after people have watched you live. A birth name comes before the story. The name that stays with you is often something the story produced.
It is still given, but it has to survive. Somebody tries one out, other people repeat it, and you either answer to it or you don’t. Time gives it weight or lets it die. With the names we embrace, every time you turn your head and answer, you cast a vote. The names we keep are often given by other people, but confirmed by us.
That doesn’t make every name good. Some are cruel, built on someone’s weight, accent, or stutter. Some were imposed by people with power, or belong to a version of us we worked hard to leave behind. And some people feel most like themselves in their full given name. That isn’t a hole in the argument. It’s the argument working. They chose too. The name you embrace, whether it’s your birth name, a middle name, or something else, has a kind of consent behind it that paperwork never did.
Notice who uses which. Your legal name belongs to the DMV, the bank, the pharmacy, the IRS, and the nurse reading it slightly wrong off a clipboard. About the only people who used your full government name with feeling were your parents, usually when you were in trouble. Some part of the brain still hears it and starts reviewing the last forty-eight hours for evidence. Your lived name belongs to the people who were there. If one name serves institutions and the other belongs to the people who actually know you, maybe the legal name is the costume. Maybe it’s the version of you that goes to the bank.
Then there’s Reggie
Soup is the name with the history in it. Reggie is what happens when Soup goes to work.
Reggie wasn’t a branding decision. It was born out of necessity. My stutter hadn’t loosened its grip yet, and people had the hardest time pronouncing Reginal. It’s seven letters. People found a remarkable number of ways to get it wrong, and I got called all kinds of names I never agreed to along the way. So I relented and went with Reggie.
Reggie isn’t fake. I chose it. But I should be honest about what it is: a workaround that hardened into a habit. For years I’ve handed people the name that makes the interaction easiest. Reggie is efficient. It prevents the pause, the correction, the second attempt. It lets me get to the point. But efficiency isn’t the same as authenticity. Sometimes it’s just a polished form of preemptive accommodation.
Plenty of people adjust far more than a name for the rooms they walk into, and I won’t pretend my version is the same as theirs. Many of my colleagues already call me Soup. The honest question is why I still introduce myself as Reggie first, and what it would signal to the rooms I lead if I stopped.
What the form says first
The room starts setting expectations with the very first form. Most job applications collect your legal name first. Somewhere further down, often optional, sits a field labeled “Preferred name.” Preferred. As in: the real one is up top, and this is a courtesy. The name you’ve answered to for thirty years, the one your whole professional network knows, gets filed as a preference, somewhere in the neighborhood of dietary restrictions.
Organizations spend real money talking about employee experience, belonging, and culture. Then the first interaction a candidate has with the company is a form that essentially says, “That’s lovely. Now what does the government call you?”
The friction doesn’t stop at the form, and it’s easy to picture how it plays out. The recruiter schedules the interview with Reggie, and the panel’s packet says Reginal. The offer letter, the background-check vendor, the HR system, the laptop login, the email display name, the chat profile, the directory, the badge, and payroll can each handle the name a little differently. The new hire spends the first week correcting people and systems, one interaction at a time. Each correction is small. Together they’re the organization’s first message: we’ll get to who you are once the system is satisfied.
Trust is supposed to start building on day one. That process spends day one asking for an exception. The reverse is just as visible. A manager who gets the name right on the first morning signals that accuracy about the person matters, not only accuracy about the record.
The standard is simple. Collect the legal name for payroll, tax reporting, background checks, benefits, and identity verification. Then make “What name do you go by?” the primary field in every system a human being actually sees. Not “nickname,” which is too narrow. Kenzell isn’t a nickname. It’s my middle name, and for most of my family it was simply my name. And don’t call it a preference. Call it what it is: the person’s name.
I’ll admit I’m not a perfect witness. This essay lives on a website with my legal name in the address. Even while making the case for Soup, I’m doing it under the name the systems expect.
Professionalism without the costume
Underneath the form sits an older assumption: that professionalism requires flattening, and that your name is the first edge to file down. But leadership asks people for the parts of themselves that can’t be faked: judgment, candor, ownership when something breaks. You can’t ask for someone’s full accountability and their abridged identity in the same onboarding packet. If a name becomes acceptable only after a senior leader says it with confidence, the issue was never professionalism. It was permission.
This isn’t a request for leaders to get sentimental about names. It’s a test of whether their culture does what it says. An organization that can run payroll, benefits, security access, background checks, and identity verification can also tell the difference between the name a legal record needs and the name a person answers to in every human interaction. When it can’t, that isn’t a technical limitation. It’s a decision about whose convenience matters.
The practice isn’t complicated. Ask “What name do you go by?” in recruiting and onboarding, then make that name the default in every human-facing interaction: meeting invitations, email display names, directories, badges, and the records a manager sees. Keep legal names where the law requires them, in payroll, tax, benefits, verification, and compliance. Treat corrections as useful information, not exception requests. And audit the systems that quietly overwrite a person’s name as data moves between them.
Professionalism should mean you do the work well, keep your commitments, and treat people with respect. It doesn’t need to mean introducing yourself by a name nobody who knows you has used since the day it was typed onto a form.
A name tells you who was there
If that sounds like too much weight to hang on a name, it may be because institutions have trained us to see names as fields in a database. Mine have never worked that way. They map a life more honestly than a résumé does.
My aunties called me Two-Two. The kids I went to elementary school with on the North Side knew me as Bucky. Most of my family called me Kenzell, my middle name, and many of them went years without knowing my first name was Reginal. Each name is a timestamp. Say Two-Two and I know you’re family. Say Bucky and you knew me as a kid. Some names can only be used by certain people, and some were only ever used by one. When that person is gone, the name changes.
Then came the Army, where first names disappear and last names get stitched onto your chest. Campbell. Sergeant Campbell. The rank was real, and it was earned. But rank and trust are different things. Stripes can get you compliance. They can’t make people follow the man wearing them.
And through all of it ran Soup. It started with my high school friends, the same people I’m still close with today, crossed into the Army somehow, and stayed after every other chapter changed. To this day I can’t tell you how the Army learned it. The Army gave me Sergeant. The people around me chose Soup. Soup didn’t belong to high school after all. It belonged to me.
It was the name that crossed every boundary with me. It’s the name attached to the promises I made, the expectations people placed on me, and whether I delivered on them. Reginal shows up on the paperwork. Soup is the one that showed up for the work.
Every other name belongs to a chapter. Soup belongs to the whole book.
Assigned, then chosen
A great deal of who we are is assigned. Where we were born. The family. The neighborhood. The name. But over the course of a life, a person gets to make some choices about that inheritance: which parts to keep, which to revise, and which to answer to.
Reginal is real on paper. Reggie is real in the rooms where I learned to make myself easy to receive. But call Soup from across a room, and I turn before I think.
That isn’t a preference. That’s history.
Titles get assigned. The names that stay with us have to survive.
About the author
Reginal Campbell, Soup to the people who know him, writes about enterprise technology, AI governance, leadership, and the systems organizations build to make consequential decisions.