Nicknames are an odd phenomena

Editor’s note: This column is being reprinted from Oct. 14, 2009. Tracking nicknames can be an interesting endeavor. The origins of some are obvious, while others seem to be created out of nothing at all. Think about the nicknames you’ve had over the years as you take this trip down memory lane with Jack.

“Was there some sort of rule that you had to have a nickname at Dunkirk High School?” I kidded “Dub” Miskinis the other day during the Dunkirk reunion at the Jay County Historical Society’s Heritage Fest.

Nah, he said. If you want nicknames, Albany’s really the town for them.

Maybe so, but there seems to be a correlation between the size of a school and the tendency for alternate monikers.

At the D.H.S. celebration, for example, I chatted not only with “Dub” but with “Chick” and “Forrey” as well.

And a letter for the event had been sent in by another old friend, “Scoop” Campbell, whose wife Dorothy used to work at The News and Sun.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t the size of the school but the era we grew up in.

Receiving a nickname seemed an inevitable rite of passage in childhood and adolescence.

Some stuck and others didn’t.

(My own, for the record, lasted for about three years of high school and the first two or three years of college. To a handful of friends, I will always be “Jocko,” even in my dotage.)

A significant number came from variations of people’s names. “Klop,” “Fitz,” and “Smitty” were buddies of mine in high school; none of them, to my knowledge, goes by those names today.

In college, there were “Rid-O” and “Don-Don,” not to mention “RAM,” a linebacker whose nickname came from both his initials and his style of play on the football field.

But sometimes the distortions of names got so far from the original that the connection disappeared.

Only his classmates could tell you the real last name of “Coongie,” I suspect.

Often the nicknames came from physical characteristics. “Orange” got his name because it was a more accurate description of his hair than “Red.” (Today, he’d more accurately be called “Whitey.”)

Other times, the name involved some pointed commentary.

You always knew that a kid nicknamed “Brickhead” wasn’t in line to be valedictorian.

Some were straightforward: “Tex.”

Others were shrouded in mystery: “Rue”? “Eby”? What tale was behind names like that?

And then there was the menagerie.

In high school and college I was proud to count among my friends “Monkeyman,” “Orangutan,” and “Cheetah.”

(“Cheetah” liked to scale the sides of buildings like a monkey. And “Orangutan”? Well, he was pretty much a hairy ape.)

But what’s most striking about this entire inventory, which spans several decades, is that all of the nicknames belonged to guys.

Maybe it wasn’t a girl thing to do.

Next time I see “Dub,” I’ll ask his opinion on the issue.