Amusing nicknames for things?

In My Humble Opinion
1

So, it occurs to me that lots of airplanes get what I consider to be highly amusing nicknames (I’ll name a few in a moment), so I figure we should have a thread listing (and explaining, if possible or necessary) funny nicknames for various things (vehicles, buildings, whatever).

My short list to start with:

F-16 Fighting Falcon, AKA “The Lawn Dart” (It’s got a dart-like pointy tip on the nose, and early in their career the planes were plagued with crashes)

F-15 Eagle, AKA “The Flying Tennis Court” (If you ever look at the top of this plane, you are presented to a huge expanse of relatively flat area)

B-52 Stratofortress, AKA the BUFF (Big Ugly Fat Fu -erm- Friend), it’s Big, it’s Ugly, and it’s Fat. :smiley:

Cessna T-37, AKA the “Tweet” or “6,000lb Dog Whistle” (very loud, very high-pitched engines)

RA-5 Vigilante, AKA the Passionate Pachyderm (relatively huge Navy recconisance/strike bomber, known for the elephant-like squealing sounds the engines made as the pilot came in for landing on carriers).

2

Nashville’s Bell South building has the nicknameBatman Building but this picture isn’t quite as clear as other views from greater distances for why that’s such an apt nickname.

3

many years ago Cape Canaveral was conducting tests of the SNARK missile and so many of then failed and went into the ocean, they began referring to these as “Snark infested waters”.

4

My heavily bearded, moustached, husband had a cigarette in his mouth when he asked me to pass him the “drift punch”. I couldn’t understand what he said and I replied, “What’s a jerk wrench?” Since then, any unnamed tool is called a jerk wrench.

5

Ummm… maybe TMI.

Poop that refuses to flush is a “Molly”…
… for “The Unsinkable Molly Brown”.
(sorry!)

6

Thanks to the Simpsons. I like to call fireworks, Chinese Sky Candy

7

My grandma had a sonofabitch. Mom has the sonofabitch now. Someday I’ll have the sonofabitch, unless my older sister wants it, and eventually the sonofabitch will pass on to either my daughter or my oldest niece.

Grandma wasn’t senile, but sometimes she forgot the proper names for things, like “cedar chest”. She’s been gone for 15 years, but that chest will be known as the sonofabitch as long as our bloodline lasts.

8

Back in the early 1980s, Dorothy Johnson was the mayor of Appleton, Wisconsin. In response to the building of the Fox River Mall, the largest shopping mall in the state, in Grand Chute (just outside Appleton), Dorothy spearheaded the construction of the downtown Avenue Mall (which involved, among other things, screwing up the traffic flow of the heart of the city). Long story short, the Avenue Mall turned out to be a colossal commercial failure, and because of its vast amount of vacant store space, it is known as the Johnson Space Center.

9

The Renaissance Tower in downtown Sacramento is known as the Darth Vader building.

10

I always liked the Super Guppy

11

Tattoos on the small of a woman’s back is called a ‘tramp stamp’, but I don’t use the term because I like those tats.

Thongs that poke up above low cut jeans are called ‘whale tails’.

12

Terms for non-existent automotive systems, to be used in front of the auto-ignorant (esp. girls). “Really should have those muffler bearings aligned!” “Got the right settings for your torsion valves?” Etc.

13

The Citroen 2CV (whose official name was shorthand for deux chaveaux, or “two horses”, owing to its low horsepower rating) has acquired many affectionate/deprecatory sobriquets around the world. As the linked page states:

The Spanish citrola and citroneta have special resonance – the words are similar to citron, the French term for the fruit known to English-speakers as a lemon!

14

I’ve heard various nicknames for firearms, such as “Combat Tuppleware” for the Glocks, and my own nickname for the Beretta 92 (after having various examples, all loaners, jam multiple times for me) is the “Damned Pasta Pistol”.

Tarant County Community College up around Dallas somewhere is called, according to a friend of mine who went there, “Harvard on the Highway” Similarly, the University of Texas at Arlington is colloquially known as “The University of Texas… Almost.”

Texas A&M University’s ROTC is set up as a Corps of Cadets (all the cadets live together, dine together, etc. and train extensively outside of class when they’re not studying). The cadets who aren’t in the Band are called CTs, short for “Corps Turds”, and cadets in the band (the entire marching band is made up of cadets at A&M) are called BQs (short for Band Queers). While the longform names are discouraged by the military officers in the ROTC program at A&M, the shorthand acronyms are used all the time.

Speaking of the cadets, the seniors wear really nice leather riding boots as part of their uniforms, and students who date these cadets (or who particularly want to) are refered to as “Boot Chasers”.

Female cadets in the Corps are called WAGs (short for Woman AGgies), though the name is now considered somewhat derrogatory, it was apparantly started by the first generations of female cadets at A&M, as a means of pre-empting “Maggies” from being tagged onto them.

Silver Wings, a Public Service and Professional Self Development student organization, was originally known as “Angel Flight”, and consisted mostly of girls dating Air Force ROTC cadets. Because of these roots, the organization is sometimes refered to as “The Future Air Force Wives’ Club” (And while they get riled up when someone calls them that, an awful lot of them DO seem to marry newly-minted Air Force lieutenants, probably due to the long-standing cooperation between Silver Wings and the Arnold Air Society, the Air Force ROTC public service organization).

15

I don’t recall the context, but was amused to hear the ranting of overly-enthusiastic Glock pistol advocates (mostly CounterStrike players who don’t know much about actual guns) called a “Glockenspiel.”

16

Was it the T-37, or the T-33 that was called the ‘Converter’? (Converts fuel into noise.)

My g/f calls my Jeep ‘Grape Ape’ because it’s big and purple.

17

Despite years of riding the Red Line over it, I never could remember the real name of the Salt and Pepper Bridge in Boston. I had to look it up to recall it’s really the Longfellow Bridge. I bet if you asked people on the street, more people would call it the Salt and Pepper than the Longfellow.

18

A dixieland (aka “moldy fig”) jazz fan of my acquaintance refers to saxophones as “cat extinguishers.” He says he got the term from a 1920s Krazy Kat comic strip where Ignatz the mouse beaned Krazy over the head with one.

19

The Junior College I’ve attended has, on campus, the “William B. Race Health Sciences Building.”

Being the loyal Northern Californian college student that I am, I always think of it as the “Race Sciences Building.” :smiley:

And I understand that the A-7 Corsair II is known as the “People Eater” in some circles, due to the design and location of the engine’s air intake. (I’ve seen video demonstrating this pretty clearly. Ow.)

20

We refer to our cheese graters as “rapists”, used to “rape” cheese or carrots or whatever. It’s not really offensive in origin, it’s simply that sometimes, hubby uses the French word for things in English - in this case, “râpe” (r-ahp). It’s been years since that hilarious mistake!