I guess I’ve known so many Skips and Trips that I don’t consider them unusual at all.
There was a guy on our tennis league called Shrek. His body shape was remarkably like the character, he was a big guy probably over 275lbs, and his personality was very gentle. He hit a bomb serve and moved remarkably and deceptively well.
There were 4 Ashleys on my niece’s 7th grade soccer team.
I remember hearing a parent yelling during a game, “Get the ball one of you Ashleys!”.
mmm
Trip and also Trey and very common nicknames for people who are IIIs. Similarly Chip for II or Jr.
Was a first for me. Never heard it before. I thought Trip was maybe conceived at Woodstock.
One of my elementary school teachers thought I looked like Ron Howard, then starring on The Andy Griffith Show, and called me Opie. No one else ever did.
One of my favorite cartoons, circa 1970s:
Trip for Triple. That’s why a III gets that nickname.
I have a friend called Steve, who everyone calls Mick.
When he was a teenager he had his hair permed and styled and his
school friends thought he looked like Willie DeVille who was in a band
called Mink DeVille, so they called him Mink. Most people misheard it
as Mick and that one stuck.
Trip and Trey, I understand. Where does Chip come from?
“Chip off the old block”
Interesting that he chose to keep the generic nickname for “recruit”.
Grew up with a guy named James who introduced himself as J.W. J.W. is a lot of syllables, so we soon started calling him ‘Jay-Dub,’ and years later just ‘Dub.’ Cool name, could have been a good nickname for a rapper.
The downside was people often misheard and would ask why everyone was calling him dumb.
I know that. NOW. I had know idea his real name was Henry III.
I had a friend in high school. Most of us were short-haired and clean-shaven. He had long(ish) hair and a beard.
Someone told him that he looked like Jesus Christ. Since he was an outspoken atheist, that really ticked him off.
We started calling him “Superstar”.
My dad gave me the nickname Boonie. It was for the word Boondocks. This was before the song Down in the Boondocks came out. Who knows?
His nickname was Sonny. He was the first son of Italian immigrants. I think that was kind of a tradition for Italian families back then. I never heard anyone in his family call him by his real name.
“Boondocks,” as a term for a rural or isolated area, looks to be a loanword from Tagalog, and started becoming used in the U.S. during and after WWII. So, yeah, use of it predates that song (from 1965).
I worked with a guy who insisted on being called Merlin, as he claimed he was a real wizard with spreadsheets. He refused to answer to his real name and the only reference to it in the entire company was on his pay slip. If you tried using his real name he would just ignore you completely.
You can probably guess that he was rather obnoxious, but that payslip was for more than a million pounds a year, 25 years ago. So maybe he really was a wizard with spreadsheets.
One of the guys I was in college band with, during band camp freshman year, forgot to wear his nametag, the penalty for which was that he had to have his name Sharpied onto his forehead. He took this with such great aplomb that someone remarked that he had great big moose balls.
He was forever after known as “Mooseballs”.
In grad school, I had a classmate whose given name was “James”. He was tired of being “Which James?”, and he figured, grad school, nobody here knows him, he can make a clean change, and so he started going by his middle name, “Lewis”. Of course, between the hundred or so faculty and grad students combined, there weren’t actually any other Jameses, but there was a Louis.
A couple of years ago, I had a class with four different "Elizabeth"s on the roster. Fortunately, there are about a thousand different nicknames for “Elizabeth”, and each of them went by a different one.
I coached my kids’ soccer teams for several years, and one season I had five boys named Robert. At our first meeting, I put the five of them in a group and told them to figure out what each wanted to be called, and the only rule is that each had to have a unique name. I ended up with Robert, Rob, Bobby, Roberto (which usually ended up being Berto), and Burn, the kid’s last name. Burn fit as a nick, because that kid was fast. It was years later that I realized that kid may have been named for the poet.
I just remembered my Uncle Buddy and his little sister, Pee Wee. Pee Wee married a fella who went by Shorty.
Does it count as a nickname if it’s only used by three people? My brother’s name was Patrick, and nearly everybody called him Pat. On his judo belt he had the rough Japanese equivalent pronunciation of Pat embroidered on it, パト, which is “pato”. (You might see where this is going.) Two of our students, a brother and sister, were Hispanic, and their mom mostly spoke Spanish. Once they found out what was embroidered on his belt, they started calling him “Sensei Duck”.