I've always been jealous of people whose names are peculiarly designed for easy translation to initials. Mine - DLL - just don't cut it. It's hard to say why, but everyone knows it doesn't work. I will forever be robbed of that illusive symbol of prestige.
The use of initials for public figures appears to be mostly a modern phenomenon. I don't recall historically anyone ever referring to George Washington as GW or Thomas Jefferson as TJ.But beginning in the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, we discovered that if we referred to him very simply as FDR that it was not only a lot easier to say and write, but it had a certain unmistakable stature.
Most presidents who followed FDR in office tried the same thing, but a mysterious thing happened. Harry S. Truman discovered that HST somehow did not ring a bell.
Dwight David Eisenhower didn't exactly turn the world on fire with DDE either, but then he didn't need to - because he already had a terrific nickname with exactly three letters - Ike.
The only thing is - Ike sounded much too familiar and failed to achieve the goal of using initials - which is PRESTIGE. After Ike, John F. Kennedy found that JFK worked perfectly, and so everyone used it. Even his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, was immediately transformed to LBJ.
But Richard M. Nixon unhappily found RMN was the wrong combination. It didn't provide the unique sound that a certain, mysterious combination of letters elicits. Gerald R. Ford failed the test as well (GRF?), and Jimmy Carter had already committed the great and abominable sin for presidents - allowing himself to be called Jimmy even before he was elected.
His full name, James Earl Carter, translated, was JEC, but it was not instant prestige. Ronald Wilson Reagan also failed to qualify with RWR, and our current president managed to symbolize the worst of all possible worlds with FOUR initials. So George Herbert Walker Bush must be known as GHWB, not exactly initials that slip effortlessly off the tongue.
As we look at the current possibilities to suceed Bush, we see William Jefferson Clinton, which sounds very distinguished, but WJC is not memorable - and HRP for H. Ross Perot is such a non-sequitur that it would be even more difficult to recall to mind.
Fortunately, only presidents are expected to have these distinguished initials. Lots of other people have such initials for the first two letters of their names, and some of those work better than others. Utah's most famous example is J.D. Williams, who, unfortunately, is retiring this year as a professor of political science at the University of Utah.
Not only his friends but his students have always been encouraged to refer to this legendary scholar as J.D. In J.D. 's case, the initials seem to accomplish the best of both worlds - he seems down-to-earth at the same time he seems important.
When I attended Olympus Junior High School many years ago, a celebrated math teacher named L.R. Ivins taught there. To this day I don't know what the initials stand for, but faculty members as well as students called him L.R. There was no other teacher who allowed students to use his first name. It seemed to do the same thing for L.R. that it did for J.D.
He was distinctive.
In movie history, we had W.C. Fields - and on television, the most celebrated example is colorful J.R. Ewing of "Dallas."
To be singled out by initials alone is a rare honor for which only a few of us qualify. If you do, make something big out of it - start a department store and name it something catchy like - J.C. Penney.
But never use JCP. I can't tell you why.