I knew a guy back in the day whose nickname was “Bubooglio.” His real name was Charles Gibolardo. He got his nickname because somebody was too drunk to pronounce his name correctly, and it stuck.
I have a friend known as “Gangrenous”, more formally, “The Mighty Gangrenous”.
His name is Angus.
My mother’s nickname in her family was “Squig” - I think from the time when my grandmother got pregnant, and they didn’t know the baby’s gender until birth… and then it stuck around.
When it was learned that Boyd was late in returning some porn videos to the local Blockbuster, Boston sportswriter Peter Gammons dubbed it “the Can’s film festival.”
There are plenty of musicians with cool nicknames.
The late great Duane Allman was known as Skydog.
Paulina Villarreal, drummer for the mexican rock band The Warning is known, quite appropriately as Pau (pronounced “pow”)
My neighbor Dick, who was an Episcopalian bishop and a short man, had a wife whose best friend was also married to a Dick, a tall man. So the wives referred to their husbands as either “my Dick” and “your Dick’, or 'Big Dick” and "Little Dick’.
Chris Squire, longtime bassist for the progressive rock group Yes, was well-known for his nickname “Fish,” to the point that the nickname was incorporated into the titles of an instrumental song he wrote for the band, and of his first solo album.
A number of possibilities have been suggested for the origin of the name, though it appears likely that it was affixed to Squire by Yes drummer Bill Bruford:
- Squire’s astrological sign was Pisces (“the fish”).
- When Bruford and Squire shared a house in the band’s early days, Bruford noted Squire’s tendency to take extremely long baths.
- Also in the band’s early days, Squire flooded his hotel room in Oslo, while taking a shower.
- It may be a heteronymic pun on the word “bass,” which can variously mean a type of fish, or the bass guitar (Squire’s instrument).
Reminds me of the kid we knew in high school called Robie, because he liked to drink Robitussin cough syrup for a buzz. I have no idea what his real name was.
There was a guy who played for the Guardians the last couple of years, Johnkensey Noel. His nickname was “Big Christmas.”
I have a friend named Bundle. Her dad called her his bundle of joy. She has gone by Bundle for over 50 years. Most people don’t know her real name. I think she even had it on her business cards and nameplate at work.
Your nick isn’t Pete, is it? When I was in the Navy in VS-41, Pete was my team lead in the avionics shop (where we worked) and he gave lots of people nicknames. He called Grant “Stoney” because he said he looked like a Stoney. He called another tech “Susie” , short for Susie Homemaker because of a trick one of the other guys pulled on her. And I was dubbed “Fred” because one time he was talking to our boss about me and he forgot my name, so he indicated me while saying “… and Fred here…” so for the next two years I was Fred. And, no, it’s nowhere even close to my first or last names. Pete’s name wasn’t Pete, either - it was Terry.
We, rather unkindly, called an ex-sister-in-law Atilla the Homemaker because she was rather coarse, and in the end, she treated my husband’s brother (her soon-to-be-ex) in a really shitty manner. So in reality, she deserved to be called even worse, but we were all just glad to see the last of her.
My uncle-by-marriage’s father, who was the child of Luxembourger immigrants to southeastern Wisconsin, was named Alphonse, but was referred to, by pretty much everyone, as “Schatzie” (German for “sweetheart”).
He was a very gregarious, larger-than-life guy, and I’m pretty sure that nearly everyone in the town where he lived (a bit north of Milwaukee) knew him…but most people who knew him had no idea what his given name was. At least when I was a kid in the '60s and '70s, he had arranged with Wisconsin Telephone to have an alternate listing in the town’s white pages (residential numbers) which simply gave the name “Schatzie,” along with his phone number.
I have an uncle whose real name is Robert, but everyone called him Pete. The reason for that was that his sister (my mom) had wanted to name him Peter Rabbit.
I have two Uncle Buddy’s.
One maternal.
One paternal.
I was nearly five years older than my brother. I have no memory of this but when my mother was pregnant, they told me that if it was a boy, he would be named Anthony and we would call him Tony. Except that the grandparents blew their stacks and said that Anthony is a Taleinker (Yiddish for Italian) and essentially fobade them to use it. So they named him Alan. But they forgot to tell me apparently. So for a couple months every time they called him Alan, I corrected them and said that his name was Tony. (Me stubborn?) Eventually they gave and he was Tony until he got married and his wife refused to call him Tony. He discovered that his name was really Alan in kindergarten. But he corrected it to Tony.
When I was in the Navy, I hung around with two guys, Steve and electricians mate, and Andrew, a sonar tech. We called them Onionhead and Skeeter.
Andrew was Skeeter, because he had a narrow face and a very long narrow nose and wore glasses.
Steve was called Onionhead because he had very short hair with the exception of the top of his head where he had long hair that he could keep under his cap… When he took the cap off, you look like an onion head.
I just remembered two more. All names and nicknames have been changed.
Booboo: I have a cousin who I’ve known as “Booboo” all my life. She’s about four years older than me and they’ve always lived 1000 miles away, so visits were only about once a year. Everybody in the family - about 70 people, including aunts, uncles, and cousins - called her Booboo. One day when I was about 12 or 13, my mom said, “Your cousin Alexandra is getting married.” I said, “I have a cousin Alexandra?” Mom replied, “You didn’t think her real name was ‘Booboo’, did you?” It turns out her older sister started calling her Booboo as an infant, and everybody else picked up on it. She’s approaching 70, and I think her husband and my wife are the only family that call her Alexandra.
TJ: I know a young man who is called “TJ” by friends and family. His real name is David. I asked him how he picked up that nickname, and he said he had been nicknamed TJ in utero. When his mom told her best friend she was expecting, the friend squealed, “Oh, you’re gonna have a little TJ!” He doesn’t have a single T or J in his first, middle, or last name!
When I was in my very early 20’s, I hung out with a group of guys, two of whom had the same name but were different races. There was a lot of confusion when referring to one or the other at first but then everyone started referring to them as (not their real first name) Black Bobby White and White Bobby White.
New a guy Henry III (Henry the third). He was called ‘Trip’ to the point that that was his name now.
Screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr was known to his family as Bunny. No idea where that came from, but he was my Uncle Bunny.
“Changed Daily” may be the funniest nickname I’ve ever seen. The context is important. It is, in fact, the code name of the chief in the animated series “The Secret Show.” For security reasons, his real name is kept secret. Instead, people address him by a different code name every day, which sounds more like a hilarious nickname rather than a real code name. Some ridiculous new aliases are “Chuckle Botty" or “Windy Pops”. If you watch the show, you will enjoy them all. I did.
There were five Debbies in my 7th grade math class.