When one of PNS's youth writers referred to a friend called "Half-Dead" (a kid who'd been shot 20 times and survived) we knew there was much to be learned from having young people write about the meaning of nicknames. Seven writers for YO! (Youth Outlook) talk about the role of nicknames in youth culture, ranging from inner-city to prep school. YO! is a publication by and about Bay Area youth produced by Pacific News Service.

Now more than ever young people feel the need to define themselves and a lot of them do it through nicknames. Pookie, June Bug and T Bone are typical nicknames in the urban neighborhoods where I grew up. But today names like Half-Dead, Watch-Your-Back, Tree Frog or Tree Stump are becoming more common -- as are names for darker skinned brothers with the prefix Black. (Half-Dead got his name because he'd been shot almost twenty times before he was twenty himself.)

Sometimes acronyms will form your nickname (like CRJ, my nickname, which stands for Charles R. Jones). Dave becomes Dirty-Ass-Vietnam-Escapee (no joke!). In most cases, however, it's a physical attribute or personal characteristic that earns you your nickname on the street.

As a light-skinned brother, I've carried several nicknames since childhood -- Casper, Light Bright, Red or White Boy -- depicting whiteness as opposed not to blackness but to darkness. Some people have even referred to me as Sunshine (which I don't particularly like).

You might ask why one should accept a name other than one's birth name -- why try to redefine oneself? But everyone is a collective being made up of different experiences. You are not the same person to your mother that you are to Ray Ray down the street. And you're probably unrecognizable to both when you're with Keisha (Miss Boom Bam Pow herself).

As the following essays show, nicknames tell you a lot about a young person's identity -- both in his or her eyes or in the eyes of friends or enemies. They're also windows into what matters most in a young person's particular community and how one youth subculture differs from another.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Before she put on her travel pack and headed out West, the young woman with red hair, bullets through her ear, a "class war" T-shirt caked with dirt, and boots stained with the filth of the last three states she passed through might have been Charlotte or Jennifer. Here on Market Street, she is Lint.

Street kids -- young people who've left home to be on their own -- have many different reasons for choosing their street "handles" and many have no specific reasons at all. But all such names indicate a certain affiliation with one of the dozen or more "scenes" happening on the street -- a declaration of communal identity.

On Haight Street people tend to divide into Punx and Rainbows (aka hippies). Punx are associated with fast, aggressive music, caustic visual imagery and anarchist and socialist political philosophy. Some Punx are also into veganism (refusal to consume animal products), animal liberation, squatting, using "garbage" as a resource, public drunkenness, freight hopping, and other forms of anti-social self-expression. Rainbow people, by contrast, are associated with folk music, colorful clothing, psychedelic drug use, radical environmentalism, sharing and other tenets of 1960's-era Utopian ideals.

Most Punx say their names either don't mean anything or that the meaning is self-evident. Typical punk names tend to be urban (Dumpster) or self-effacing (Mouse), derogatory (Blister) or allusions to social problems (Tim Toxic). Other punk names include: Scooby, Spoo, Oi!, Fish, Lint, Indio, Mouse, Blister, Dumpster, Spider, Horse.

Punx note that while their names "don't mean anything," hippies "will talk your ear off if you ask THEM what their names mean."

Rainbow names, in fact, tend to have positive connotations or allusions to nature -- such as Flower, Synergy, Rainbow Mountainwalker, Crystal, Peacemaker, Leaf, Rainforest. Speaking at 100 words per minute, Synergy says her name "means, like, energy and, like, sun and, like, everything's possible and, like, center of energy..." When asked if she ever uses her given name she responds: "Only for, like, applications an' technical bulls...t. It's better not to use your real name, it's safer. I don't want my family to find stuff out, and I got friends, you know, I wanna stay away from. I don't want stuff to get back to me."

Dirthead has a different idea of what his name means. When asked if he minds giving his legal name, he offers it without hesitation. "Yeah, David Willis. It's not about hiding my identity, it's just that there's too many Daves.

"If someone says, 'Hey, Dirt,"' he adds with a smile, "I know who they're talking to."

Danny Boy sits on the sidewalk behind a sign declaring her intention to collect enough money to go to Oregon. Now 18, she says her parents named her Jessica. What does her new name mean? "It's from that Irish song -- you know?" she replies, her curly mohawk bouncing and her buckles jangling.

"It sounds like a butch name," a reporter suggests.

"Well, yeah, it is" agrees Danny Boy, nodding her head.

Turkey, 23, has a straightforward nickname. "It started as a tease," Turkey explains. "I used to have a big mohawk but then it got sawed up in prison... I'm not trying to hide my identity, I'm just used to Turkey. I like it better."

You're fourteen years old on the brisk autumn morning when your parents drive you up to New Hampshire. You arrive at your dormitory, unload your stuff, watch your parents leave. Suddenly you become someone else. Within a few weeks, you won't even be known by the name you've been called all your life.

At the small New England boarding school I graduated from, every freshman had to endure a rite of passage: receiving a nickname. This was among the means upperclassmen employed to put you in your place -- at the bottom of the totem pole. Other means included flogging and "ponding" (throwing particularly brazen students into the pond).

I was lucky. As a small, geeky-looking kid with braces, I posed no threat to the upperclassmen, so I was given an innocuous nickname: Billy T. Others in my class, like the freshman stud football player whom the older girls found "cute" -- received more derogatory nicknames: Pork Ball, Shaggy Dog, Shank, and the classic Nipple Nose.

Part of me was glad to avoid the overt scorn that came with a name like Nipple Nose. But I was also jealous of my more ridiculed classmates. To make some guy several years older feel he had to belittle you was evidence of your strength of character. "Billy T" identified a harmless kid in need of sympathy.

When I became an upperclassman, I fulfilled my role in this ongoing ritual. Like all seniors, I had been given a freshman to "mentor." Unofficially, this also meant giving the student his nickname. My freshman was a shy kid from a small town, just like me. But there was a side of his personality that made naming him easy. He arrived at school hauling Batman shirts, shoes, posters, rings, bed sheets, even a Batman bike. As his "old boy," I took it upon myself to christen him "Batboy."

Every year, the Rector of the school delivers a speech demanding an end to hazing. But last spring, when I went back to school for a class reunion, I realized nothing had changed. Walking through the dorms, I saw that familiar swagger among the seniors, and the look of trepidation in the eyes of freshmen -- the yearning for someone to acknowledge that they were human.

It's been years since my classmates and I endured freshman hazing, but I don't think all the scars have healed. When I see someone call my friend by his high school name, Nipple Nose, I can feel him flinch.

Calling my friends by the names their parents gave them would tell you how close we aren't. Instead, we call each other the names we wish we had. What feisty young person would want to be called Midred or Hildegaard, for example -- names that seem fit only for the old? Sometimes we give each other nicknames for things we've done or embarrassing moments in our lives. That's the true test of how well we know each other and how strong our friendship is.

Only my best friend can call me by my nickname, which is "Falldown" for a particularly clumsy moment when I fell -- big time. Other friends carry nicknames from experiences they'd rather forget. The saddest nicknames are for girls whose hearts are perpetually broken -- like Sad Girl.

We gain strength from these names until we feel ready to claim the ones we received at birth. Sometimes we keep our nicknames for life because our real names can never describe what we've seen or felt. Other times we simply grow into our birth names, accepting them as a testament to who we are and how far we've come.

Like so many kids my nickname was the only one I identified with. "Nikki" is who I've been from birth. I only discovered the name Andrea when I was six. "Who is that?" I thought to myself, probably out loud. Even today, 15 years later, the name doesn't seem to belong to me.

While my kid name was able to mature with me, my sister Rhonda wasn't as lucky. My Daddy called her "Stank" for the longest time. She couldn't claim that name for all the gold in Cairo, and through her adolescence she experimented with countless names and titles that never quite fit -- poor thing.

Nikki fit the curious little girl I was. Being a name without a gender attachment, it could follow me climbing up trees or baking cookies in my little Eazy Bake Oven. I could be whomever I wanted from one nano-kid-moment to the next.

By the time I was 14, however, Nikki did nothing to help me get over the hurt of not feeling feminine enough. Secretly I wanted to be "Candy" or "Princess." In one fateful moment I decided to change the spelling of Nikki to Nicci because I thought "c"s were cuter. Friends and relatives teased me by pronouncing my new name "Nee-chee" or "Nee-see."

Not long after Nicci showed up this Andrea person started hanging around and boy, did she bug me. My most hated teachers insisted on calling me Andrea. The more they wanted me to be Andrea, the more I felt like Nicci.

Today, Nicci is my name of endearment, catching the essence of who I've become and always wanted to be -- sassy, saucy, smart, and spirited. Maybe Nissssi is more fitting? Nah!

My name is Oscar Daniels but I prefer to be called GROUCH. I got my name when I was about seven. We were all sitting in my friend's house when his sister asked me what my nickname was. I told her "None of your business." When my friend asked why I was so mean, I answered, "Because I'm Oscar the GROUCH." He started to laugh because it was pretty funny. But soon I knew that GROUCH was going to be my name for life.

Now that I'm 15 I still would rather be called GROUCH because I don't trust too many people. Only a handful know my real name. And when they do find out I tell them to call me GROUCH. I want to be sure they won't try to hurt me or my family. I always remember how the older guys in my neighborhood told me to listen carefully to what people say and look them in the eye to see if they're real.

To this day there are only two people who call me Oscar: my grandparents. They're the two people I trust the most because I know they would never hurt me in any way.

My nickname is Ladie. Why Ladie? I wanted the formality of the name when I noticed how often black males used the words "bitch," "ho" or "broad" in their vocabulary.

It really affected me emotionally when a black man would ask me for my phone number or my attention. If I didn't respond, or if I ignored them when they'd call me with this weird sound like I was in some kind of jungle, they'd curse me just to humiliate me.

I grew tired of the word bitch and began wondering, could a black male fix his mouth to say "woman," "miss," "lady," or "excuse me?"

Well, believe it or not, they can say it -- hell, they even sing it! And sometimes I wonder if they sometimes say to their patnas, without thinking, "I got at this fine bitch named Ladie."