Not even when it's your own, and that's disturbing. People ask—Where does "Kit" come from?—and frankly, I don't have a clue. Well, I think I have now, but there's no way to find out for sure.

My nick-name has been slowly coined in school, class after class, year after year, Cristian shortened and mutated into many intermediary forms until finally morphed into Kit. For about fifteen years (or more?) I thought this was the random outcome of an arbitrary path of phonetic explorations. Kids' play. Dices. Destiny.

Imagine how my jaw dropped looking at this Wikipedia entry (full of surprises, this Wikipedia thing):


Do you know that moment in a movie when our hero finds out about his real identity? Eh.

Kit is a nickname that stands for Christopher. We don't have Christopher name in Romanian but my name, Cristian, comes pretty close and is quite common. My crazy theory claims that my kid colleagues unknowingly reenacted in a 12 years time-lapse a pice of English onomastics' history that maybe took hundreds of years in its original iteration.

There must be a rudimentary sense of language burned into DNA and hardwired in our brain somewhere, don't you think? I guess I'm a nativist.