Bansag

"Nicknames" in Tagalog. I've been given a few in my lifetime:

• Sadot. "Lazy" in Ilocano. My high school freshman agriculture teacher (he was Visayan, go figure) gave me this nickname because I was horrible in tending to my plot. We were each given a plot to plant eggplants, okra (gumbo) and onions. My harvests were usually the smallest, my plot had weeds all over, and the soil just looked utterly unhealthy. Oh, well. I survived freshman year — I wasn't quite the "sadot" after all.
• Weird. No explanation here. I am weird. But when that word comes from an Earth Science (high school again, fourth year this time) teacher (she had passed away, may she rest in peace) who didn't exactly look "normal", it takes on a whole new dimension. That nickname stemmed from her catching me wearing makeshift 3D (stereoscopic, I think, is a more apt term?) glasses (took colored plastic candy wrappers and stuck them in my classmate's eyeglasses) during class. Hey, I was looking at some awesome maps in the textbook; I wasn't exactly horsing around.
• Superficial. This one coming from a very popular English professor in the university. She would label all my work that way, and it stung. I've always thought I wrote sufficiently pithy essays and papers, but not to her. Helped me improved my writing, though.
• Bagyo. "Typhoon" in Filipino. By far the most cruel, since it came from my high school (and up to now still) friends. I used to brag a lot back in high school (well, freshman and sophomore years, mostly). It was a constant game of one-upmanship back then, and foolish child that I was, I would never back down, always armed with a better story, a better toy, a better anything. Hence, the term. I wasn't that affected, though: all kids are cruel, and at some point, we all grew out of it.
• Tulis. "Sharp" in Filipino. Got this "bansag" during my CEGP days, from the most, er, creative namepicker I ever met. It meant, in our own group argot, "great with girls". :D Okay, it was meant as a pejorative more than anything else, but macho me, I didn't mind.