My Names

My legal name is Efthymios Kallos. However, people don't like this name very much and have been using different ways to call me. Especially when I went to the United States in 2003, the matter became so complicated that even I am confused sometimes. So here is a list of my names and which people use them.

• Themos ("e" is pronounced like "ai" in the word "air")
  This is how my close friends and family call me; my mother gave it to me because she thought "Efthymios" was a really bad one.
  
  
• Themos ("e" pronounced like "ee" in the word "bee")
  My housemate and most American people call me like that. Don't know why.
  
  
• Themo
  My former Ph.D. advisor, because he is half-Greeks and knows that names in Greek do not have always a final 's'.
  
  
• Themoulis
  My girlfriend calls me like that. And my mother-in-law. And the italian guy from work that overheard a conversation we had.
  
  
• Efthymios
  One of my professors at USC called me like that; I introduced myself to him like that since I wanted him to have in mind the formal name I have in the homework sets. Then he started calling me like that during class, so all of these classmates and his research group is calling me Efthymios.
  
  
• Efthymis
  An old guy in my home town calls me like that.
  
  
• Efthymakis
  An old lady in my mother's home town calls me like that.
  
  
• F3
  My roommate Rajay likes that name a lot (Efthy-->F3).
  
  
• Kallos
  This is how people know me in the Kung-Fu class. I said both Themos Kallos when I introduced myself, but the instructor only kept the easier one.
  
  
• Tim
  My name in Starbucks & at the Tennis Club. For some reason people there did not understand Themos without saying it first for 4 times, so I had to switch to something simpler.
  
  
• Johnny
  My name in clubs and bars. I needed an easy American name that Americans have heard before, because in the presence of loud music it's impossible to grasp a name you've never heard before.
  
  
• Tough Carlos
  The car-dealer lady calls me like that. The full details are in my blog: here
  
  
• Timaras
  At the age of 6, when I started learning english, my teacher used to call me Efthymios, or Tim. Later on, when I got a computer, I added the part -aras (-άρας), which in Greek is inserted to denote something as very big. Since then, I kept using timaras as my nickname (for example, when I played Civilization, I was King Timaras, my capital was Timaroupolis, and my people were called Timarioi).