I Hate Nicknames

I hate nicknames. Not all nicknames. I hate those that I can’t piece together. Take J McFizzle, for instance. Any 12 year-old white kid who thinks he’s a ‘Gangsta’ knows what I’m getting at. Conversely, if I were to end a musing with…

L8rz,

Brian

You’d ask, “Who is Brian?”

“It’s me. It’s my new nickname. Get it?"

“Huh. How’d you get it?” 

“I made it up. I’m smart, like a brain, but I thought I’d be clever and switch the vowels. Now I’m ‘Brian’.”

See. That’s just senseless. Gladys, my sister does this. She calls her kids Bug and Rug. The oldest one used to be McGee, but he seems to have disassociated himself with her nickname fetish. The two that kept their –ug derivative names don’t even have names remotely close to ending in –ug. In order to link nickname to real name, you need to grab a six pack, a pillow and the television remote to listen to her explain the backstory. I just call them the names on their birth certificates…Inky and Stinky.

I think nicknames should be abolished, illegal, or easy to follow. My friend John is painfully white. He’s as white as you can be without being translucent. We call him ‘Vanilla.’ That’s so easy…it’s like ‘Hey, Vanilla! Get over here.” Everyone knows who we are talking about because he's the only blue-ish person around. If he did crossfit, even when he was in ‘Beast-mode,’ we would still call him Vanilla. BOOM! Vanilla!

L8rz,

Brian