I stumbled across the South African practice of calling the black servants “Sixpence” in Robert Heinlein’s travel book Tramp Royale, and thought it seemed pretty strange, but I’ve since encountered the nickname “sixpence” elsewhere (Nevil Shute had a character nicknamed that in one of his novels, for instance). This seems odd. Can anyone tell me where this practivce of nicknaming people after money came from? (It seems especially odd since the sixpence itself had a nickname, the “Tanner”).
Is it related to the use of “Tuppence” as a nickname? I only knew of this as a nickname Agathat Christie used in her “Tommy and Tuppence” series, but Googling it I find that it was also the name of a doll made in New Zealand and Australia, and the website says that “Tuppence [was] an endearing nickname of the time” http://home.alphalink.com.au/~jenjoy/Tuppence.html
Well, there’s “Penny” as an American nickname (although I don’t know if it’s related to the coin), but we don’t have any Nickels or Dimes or Quarters or Half Dollars. The idea of naming people after coins seems very weird. Any insights?
Edit: ‘usually’ a short form of Penelope? A quick check on the Baby Name Wizard shows that Penelope had a spike in popularity at a different earlier time to Penny, which appears mainly in the 1960s.
I know a lot of Europeans in Southern Africa gave their servants nicknames because they couldn’t pronounce their real names.
My Grandmother, for example, had a gardener called Tickey, which is a nickname for the threepenny coin. He was small, like the coin, so he was “Tickey”, I assume it was a nickname someone had given him at some point.
Not invariably, though. I knew a Penny whose real name was “Pandora”.
I’m familiar with the tradition of giving nicknames or alternate names to non-European folk. It’s widespread amomng grad students (I knew an Indian woman who called herself “Daisy”. My mother had a student from China who used “Mabel” – neither of them names I’d choose, myself, but tastes vary)
But what made Heinlein’s report weird was that he said ALL of the servants were called “Sixpence”. That’s beyond mere nicknaming – it’s submerging identity by using the same name for all of an ethnic group.
I believe that during the British Raj, it was not uncommon for British people in India to transfer a nickname from one servant to another, depending on function. Quite often, the nickname might just be the job title, like “Khansamar” for a cook or “Ayah” for a child’s nurse. But, although I can’t think of any examples, I believe that this was also done with regular names or nicknames as well.
It happened with servants in Britain too, at one time: if the mistress of the house disliked the name of a new maid (too common, too Irish or whatever) she’d assign her a new one which she would answer to while working there. In some cases there were traditional names that went with the job – a lady’s maid might always be called Abigail, for instance, no matter what the actual name of the person filling that function might happen to be.
I haven’t read it, but could it be more like calling all boat captains “Skipper”? A nickname for the role, rather than the person?
It does seem odd and demeaning, and I don’t know where or why the practice originated. I will just note it was more widespread than I would have thought.
In this country (USA) for example, for many years it was a common practice to refer to all railroad sleeping car porters as George. This practice apparently lasted at some level into the 1960s.
Ignoring the demeaning (and probably racist) overtones, the origin of “George” as the nickname for that group seems easier to pin down than ‘Sixpence”, at least from what I’ve heard. It apparently comes from George Pullman, who was the head of the company that manufactured the biggest chunk of that type of railroad car.
In my family, our parents all gave us silly nicknames when we were kids. My younger sister’s was “tuppence ha’penny” which is just a way to indicate that she was the smaller of the two girls, because it’s a small amount of money.
Actually,a tikkie was two and one half cents,phased out in the mid 1960s.The etymology is from the Afrikaans but memory isn't allowing access currently.
Although I never heard anyone call a servant by any form of "pence" whilst living in S.A.,most black South Africans (formerly referred to as Bantu) had English face names,Robert,Andrew etc.The tool boy who worked with me was named Lucas though I called him Matiro.
Must admit, I’ve never encountered “Sixpence” as a name for servants ever.
Also, “Tickey” was also the name of a reasonably famous (locally) midget clown with the Boswell & Wilkie circus, so it’s possible a short person might have been named in reference to him not the coin directly (he, of course, being named after the coin himself)
Pandora’s Box would be a cool name for a lingerie store.
Mark Twain took a tour through Europe and wrote a book about it called The Innocents Abroad. Actually, I think that the book was a compilation of a series of newspaper articles. One of the running jokes was that in every country he visited he called his tour guide Ferguson.
The British had a convoluted way of addressing servants. An upstairs maid might be dubbed with a more suitable name if necessary (incident mentioned in Miss Manner’s Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior.)
Some servants were addressed by last name (lady’s maid, butler), some by first (gardner, IIRC). The cook was addressed as “Cook”, and I think the Tweeny ('tween stairs maid) was addressed as such, too. “Abigail” was the generic term for a (lady’s maid ).
Governess was addressed with honorific (“Miss Prickett”).