We all have heard adults fussing over a baby, called he/she silly names like “Snookums”, “Itsy-bitsy Sweety-pie”. Well, maybe not those exact words, but you get the idea.

My Dad had such a name for me, “Sally.” My given name is Shirley. My middle name is Delora, his mother’s name. Mother would explode whenever she heard him call me Sally. “We named her Shirley! Don’t call her Sally!”

Dad called me Sally when I was little. By my teenage years, it was back to Shirley. I once asked him why he called me Sally. Did he know someone by that name? I never got a straight answer. I suspect somewhere in his past, Dad had a special friend named Sally.

My husband’s given name was Kenneth. I like that name, but when I called him that I would be corrected. “I’m Pug! P-U-G!, not Kenneth.” He had been called Pug since his baby days.

I remember a girl in the comics named Pug. Was he named after her? No There was a cousin with a pug nose. As a baby, family would coo and say he has a pug nose, too. The name stuck. He was PUG from babyhood on.

The only time I called him Kenneth was in our marriage vows. The minister said, “Do you take Kenneth . . . etc.” Kenneth is on his tombstone, too. No Pug there either.

My title for this story is “By Golly, Sally! When I was little, I prefaced almost every statement with an emphatic “By Golly!” Dad thought it was cute. “By Golly! I’m not ready to go to bed!” “By golly!” “By Golly!” “By Golly!”