June 24, 2007

  • nicknames

    Back in the old days a couple of my friends had this absurd nickname for me. It didn’t anger me really as I’ve never cared what anyone calls anyone. Hey you is all the means of address anyone ever needs. But it did bother me a little and at the time I wasn’t sure why. I thought it might be the lack of cleverness of it. I mean surely they could have come up with something better.Or perhaps it was the lack of tact in their choice. I have a subtle mind so I could immediately see how that particular choice might be perceived as an insult by someone more sensitive than I. But now that I think about it, I’ve never cared about tact, and although I like things that have style, I’ve never faulted anyone for being unoriginal.  So I must have had another reason for being bothered by the name.

    Now I think I know the real reason the nickname bothered me. It’s because I didn’t have any nickname for them! One sided nicknames are no fun. Rather it should be like a group of people where they all have the mutually agreed upon terms that refer to them. Like a super hero team.

    And so the nicknames I think should have the characteristics of a comic book teams nick names too. That is they should mostly be single word easy to apply terms that people don’t usually think of as names.  If a nickname is two words then they usually together make up a single concept, e.g. “Black Hole” rather than being two unrelated words strung together, e.g. “Flame Sorrow” wouldn’t work.   Sometimes the single word used as the nickname is actually short for a longer expression. For example you might call someone “Look” if you associate the phrase “Never look back” with that person for some reason. Or it might even be a convoluted indirect reference. So you might call someone “Oz” meaning “she reminds me of Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz”.

    Unlike say an internet username there is no desire for it to be particularly unique throughout the whole world or even a very large group,  just unique amongst the group applying them is good enough. The nicknames are not necessarily self chosen but there should be some sense of agreement amongst the group about each nickname.

    Most commonly the nickname is related to what the person does, ie how they behave or how they lead their lives or their personality or what they care about in some fundamental way. It isn’t necessarily the truth of that though but more often those fundamental aspects that others perceive in them. Sometimes the nickname is subtly and sometimes not so subtly ironic. I.e.  someone who often blows his top, might be assigned the nickname “Tranquil.” Other times the nickname seems to apply all the time and be appropriate to the outside world but for the group that knows the person well, the name ironically is utterly unappropriate because the person usually doesn’t behave that way at all when their defenses are down.

    Anyway, all this is why the nickname is not usually self chosen.  Sometimes the nickname arises sort of spontaneously. Some event triggers it and the character is known in accordance with what they did on that day. More frequently just over time people start thinking about the person in that term and it just starts to fit them.

    As with comic book nick names it is entirely expected that the people using these names would generally start to have mixed feelings about them, maybe even from the beginning. That’s appropriate too. Any nickname that has any power to it shouldn’t be one that sits entirely comfortably with the person it is being applied to.

    Actually as I thought about this I realized that for most of my friends from back in those days I already had terms that in my minds eye I used for them. I rarely referred to them with the terms directly thought sometimes I may have done so without even thinking about it. Others I never could come up with a good nickname for. Anyway here are the nicknames of the people I knew that I have come up with. Those I am confident of as well as those I think probably need to be revised:

    Traveller. Entrepreneur. Calculus. Dreamer. Serenity. Beatdown. Prophet. Daze. Steady. Clever. Motivator.

    I of course would want to be referred to as Sorcerer. Though of course I’d probably just be called that other term instead.

    It is also possible for a person to have two nicknames as in the comic book fashion. So I could be Sorcerer when I am doing something cool and that other term most of the rest of the time.

    It is also quite likely for a person’s nickname to change over time usually in response to certain life changing events. So, Motivator might turn into Vanish. Dreamer might become Ringbearer. Calculus might become Professor. And so on and so forth. Actually Professor is a name I’ve been called before too but not in the same mode. When I was called “Professor” it was as in short for “The Absent Minded Professor”. 

    Anyway, that amuses me. Coming up with these names. I shall have to think on them more.

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