# A word with exactly two speakers > A small chest-badge print of one invented word, written twice over in a child's own felt-tip hand — a private name that only stays private if it stays small. August 21, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/the-nickname-only-the-other-one-uses A luggage tag, printed small, exactly the size of a real one. BUB, in felt-tip, uneven, the middle letter bigger than the other two. The pen has gone over the word twice, as if once wasn't sure enough. Nobody outside two people is allowed to use this word. The print stays small on purpose. ## Why is this printed so small? Because a private name printed large stops being private, and that's the one thing this word cannot survive. A name only two people use works because saying it marks something — you're one of the two, or you're not. Blown up across a chest at a size everyone can read from across a room, it becomes a slogan instead, available to anyone who wants to try it out. A badge-sized print, the size of a tag you'd actually clip to a bag, keeps the word at the scale it was invented at: close range, noticed by the people already close enough to know what it means. ## Who actually invented a word like this? Usually a child too young to manage the real name, and the mispronunciation or the substitute stuck for good, long after the reason for it stopped applying. A sibling's own name is often the hardest word in the house for a toddler to say cleanly. What comes out instead — a shortened version, an outright invention — gets used enough times that it survives the child growing into being able to say the real name perfectly well. By then it isn't a mistake anymore. It's the name. ## Why does it only work as a two-person word? Because the moment a third person starts using it, it's just a nickname — and a nickname anyone can use isn't recording the same thing as a word one specific person invented for one specific other person. A parent picking it up and repeating it, meaning well, usually gets it back with some resistance, even from a child too young to explain why. The exclusivity isn't decoration on the word. It's the entire content of it — proof that a particular relationship exists, demonstrated by nobody else being allowed in, in the same way that [being the one who had a toy first](/stories/he-had-it-first) is a claim that only works because somebody else is excluded from it. ## What does the doubled pen stroke actually show? A child going over the letters a second time, which reads less like carelessness and more like somebody making sure the word held. Felt-tip on a small tag doesn't always take evenly on the first pass, and a child re-tracing the letters is often just fixing a patchy line. But on a word this specific, the second pass reads as something closer to insistence — this word, written twice, so it's definitely there. ## Do I need permission to print an invented word like this? Not from anybody outside the household — an invented word with no wider currency and no existing owner has nothing to license. It exists only inside one family, in the same way that [a tag stitched with two overlapping names](/stories/the-hand-me-down-with-two-names) belongs to whichever household actually used it. The only real judgement call is whether the word still belongs to the two children involved, or whether it's become something the wider family already treats as an open nickname. If it's still theirs and theirs only, that's worth respecting even in the choice to print it at all. ## Whose call is it to print somebody's private name on a shirt? Ultimately the two people the word belongs to, once they're old enough to have a view on it — a younger child can't really consent to a decision like this, so the choice sits with a parent for now, held loosely rather than treated as settled. A word invented at three and still in use at thirteen might be worn with real pride by then, or it might have become something a teenager would rather nobody printed anywhere. Asking, once asking is possible, costs nothing and heads off the second outcome. ## Does this work for a nickname used by more than two people? At that point it's usually a different kind of design entirely — a widely known family nickname sits closer to [what a whole family actually calls somebody](/stories/what-your-family-calls-you) than to a word with exactly one other speaker, and the two make different arguments. The whole point of this particular print is the number two. A nickname the aunts and grandparents all use as well is a warmer, more public kind of name, and it earns a bigger print — this one earns a small one precisely because it doesn't have that reach. ## Does it print well at this size? Yes — that's the design. A badge-sized print on the chest, roughly the footprint of a real luggage tag, holds a short word like this cleanly in one or two flat colours. Keep the felt-tip unevenness rather than cleaning the letters into a straight typeface; the imperfection is what makes it read as handwritten rather than printed twice over. A deep, dark garment lets a pale ink sit close to how felt-tip actually looks on a tag rather than on paper. ## How do I get one made? Describe the word at [JustOG](/) — who invented it, who it belongs to, and how it's actually written. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped. Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop). Ask an adult to use it and watch how fast the answer comes back.