I have a friend in town named Jonathan. I've known him since the early '90s, when his son was on a Little League team I coached. I noticed back then, as well as now, that though I refer to him as Jonathan, his wife and his old friends call him Tuck. This stems, I learned, from a youthful resemblance he supposedly bore to the Friar Tuck character in the Robin Hood legend. Since he seems to enjoy being known as Tuck, I've tried -- with modest success -- to start calling him that.

It's not easy, though, to change what you call people. My youngest son has a friend named Nick. At least that's what I call him, and that's what all his friends call him. His mom and his dad, however, both call him Nicholas. I always get the sense that they'd prefer that we use his full name as well, but I just can't do it. My wife can, but I can't. To me, he's Nick.

Same with my son's friend D. For as long as I can remember -- and he's been my son's friend since kindergarten -- he's been known as D. Everyone calls him that, except for his mom, who calls him Daniel. Maybe that's just one of those things -- that parents like to call their kids by their proper, given name. Except that in our family, it works in reverse. My son Robby has been known as Robby

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since he was born. When he's called Robert -- say, in a doctor's office -- I don't even know who they're talking about.

I don't mean to make light of this business of what you're called, since it can seem pretty important to the individual involved. I happen to know this from early, painful firsthand experience.

When I was little, I was one of the shyest kids known to man. In second grade, although I was an above-average reader, my report card said, "Reading at first-grade level." My parents, curious about this, asked the teacher. She said that since I never raised my hand to read, she figured I couldn't.

I tell you this not to boast about my early reading prowess, but to establish just how shy I was. So imagine the effort I had to summon in fourth grade to broadcast to everyone on Sandra Place and in Hawthorne Elementary School that I henceforth wanted to be known as Hank, not Henry. Nope, it wasn't easy -- but that I took the pains to attempt this change, and eventually accomplished it, is a measure of how important it was to me.

So while of all people I should be most sympathetic, for some reason I've often found it difficult when someone else issues a manifesto that starting now, their name is no longer this, but that.

For instance, there's my wife's colleague, Bob. They've known each other since they were in their 20s, both starting out in the ad biz, she as an assistant account executive and he as a junior copywriter. A few years ago, he decided he was no longer Bob. He was Robert. Now my wife, who seems to have a lot of flexibility in this regard, had no problem adjusting, but I just couldn't seem to get used to the switch. Fortunately I don't see him a heckuva lot, so he doesn't know how frequently I still refer to him as Bob.

And then there's our friend Mel, from college. I ran into him at an alumni event in New York a couple of months ago, and addressed him as Mel quite a few times in the course of our conversation, during which he seemed a bit frosty and distant. Later in the evening I noticed everyone else in the room was addressing him as Emilio, not Mel. Of course! He had gone from his Americanized name back to his "roots" name during our senior year. My bad.

Now it's one thing if you want to go from Bob to your given name of Robert -- or from Mel to your given name of Emilio. But the toughest transition of all was the one Jerry, my roommate from sophomore year in college, tried to pull off.

A few years after we graduated, Jerry headed west to L.A., where he wanted to give it a shot as a screenwriter. He was well aware that image was everything in Tinseltown, and he didn't think the name Jerry sounded very dashing. He wanted something more screenwriter. He wanted something more Hollywood. He wanted something with a little more panache. From this point forward, he was to be known as Ross.

I tried. Believe me, I tried. But I couldn't do it. Ross?

Sorry, Charlie. To me, you're still Jerry.

Westporter Hank Herman shares his Home Team column every other Friday in the Westport News.