The story that must be told.
"Where does the nickname 'Grum', come from?" I get asked this question a lot, especially since my email, license plate and phone number contain the word. In fact, when I was still living with my parents (until I went to university), any time anyone would call my house for me, it was for "Grum", not "Graham". My parents and sister don't call me "Grum", my fiancee won't have anything to do with the nickname, and my co-workers don't know about it, but anyone from Toronto that knows me, calls me by that name. And here is why...
I like to tell people that it is just a shortened version of "Graham", that if you say my name fast enough, it sounds like "Grum". But that's not the truth. When I was in grade 9, the big movie at the time was "Rambo: First Blood Part II". So everyone was talking about Rambo. Rambo this, Rambo that. Eventually someone said, "Hey, let's call you 'Grambo'."
Cool. I've got a rather masculine nickname (which was also ironic as I was a 5'something, 100lbs, 14 year-old geek at the time).
Then fate stepped in. My friend (who goes by the handle Shylock) said "Grambo doesn't sound right. Rambo's really tough, and Graham's a wimp. He's more like Gumby than Rambo." And so everyone started to call my "Grumby" instead.
This was definitely going to hurt my image with the ladies. Or at least, fortify the image I already had.
Thankfully, the nickname was eventually shortened to "Grum" (but not before being sidetracked to "Grumbachev", "Grumbatollah", and "Grumacalifragilisticexpialidocious")
And so I am still called Grum to this very day.
Okay, so it wasn't a story that had to be told. But at least I didn't make it a whole node of its own...