My ex has a brother named Ancelmo. Everyone calls him Chemo (pronounced cheh-mo). I asked if that was short for Ancelmo, but no, everyone calls him that because he’s mildly retarded and they say he acts like he’s been sniffing carpet glue, which is called chemo in Spanish.
I don’t know how unusual it is, but it sure is sad.
A guy who was friends with some of my co-workers introduced himself to me as Booger. In his 40s. Don’t know why he didn’t just say “Mike” or “Bob” or whatever.
There was a very scrawny looking guy in a softball league I used to ump in who everyone referred to as “Hemo”
I met a guy in a pub in Scotland who tried to convince me his nickname was Angus the Fence Builder, but I wasn’t buying it.
Anyhoo…I knew a couple people known by their nicknames (most people would not have known their real names). One was a guy named Bubby (not Buddy, Bubby). No idea where it came from. To me it sounded southern or Yiddish or something, but he was neither.
Another was a girl named Boo. Apparently she used to say Boo a lot as a child, so the name stuck (this was way before any notion of My Boo existed). She got a lot of ribbing when the song Me and You and a Dog Named Boo came out.
I knew several bikers, but they almost don’t count. Doc, Animal, Bear (3 different ones), Spider, Crazy, Panhead, Woody, Popeye (because he did a Popeye impersonation…real creative).
I met a man once who introduced himself as Robert Faggot. “But people call me (deliberate pause) Bob”.
I knew a guy in college who I called “Spence”. I have no recollection WHY and can’t remember his real name (it was decidedly non-Spence like Chris or Dave). I just took to calling him Spence and he didn’t object. Eventually everyone else in our circle was calling him Spence. By the time we left college, everyone called him Spence, he called himself Spence and had a license plate for his car saying SPENCE. He lived locally so his old high school friends, etc all used it. This was back in the days before Facebook and all that so we’ve long lost track but I wouldn’t be surprised if he was still going by Spence as it seemed pretty ingrained by then.
In high school I knew a girl everyone called “Squeak” due to the noise she’d make if you tickled her ribs.
Hah… college dorms seem to be one of the great fermenters of nicknames.
In college, the guys in my dorm had a plethora of weird and politically incorrect nicknames.
For example, one guy had a “Spam” logo t-shirt, and was instantly and eternally nicknamed “Spam”. Another guy (also a jew) was nicknamed, unsurprisingly enough, “Matzo Ball”.
Another guy, whose name was Doug, got the vaguely wrong nickname of “Snug” for the simple reason that it rhymed with his name. Of course, everyone assumed there HAD to be a story behind it, so poor Doug got a bunch of cock-eyed looks from the more blue-nosed types.
I myself have been the recipient of a couple of unusual and unfortunate ones. In high school, I apparently sounded like Fred Flintstone voice-wise, so one of the seniors on the track team would see me and holler “Wilma!” like Fred Flintstone. Had anyone actually got the joke, and started calling me “Fred”, I probably wouldn’t have cared. But no… “Wilma” ended up a common nickname of mine for most of high school. And my first name’s Mark.
Then, in college, I had a friend who described me as being like a conversational speedbump because I had a habit of alternating odd non-sequiturs and really thought provoking comments in conversations and nobody ever knew which, so when I opened my mouth, it was like the conversation ran over a speedbump. So that became my nickname- which got shortened to “Bump”. (hence the username).
Another guy, who hailed from Iowa, was branded “The Great Cornholio” because, you know, corn is grown in Iowa.
And then there were the nicknames that weren’t really used to people’s faces. One girl had a roommate who was constantly crabby and grouchy, and she got dubbed 'The big Ragoo" after Carmine’s nickname on Laverne and Shirley, but also because she constantly seemed to be on the rag. And there was the girl nicknamed “Hoover”…
A ‘pig’ is used to clear clogs in large diameter pipes. Pig
My uncle’s nickname growing up was ‘Dink’ because his 3yo brother couldn’t say ‘Richard’. Only close family and really old friends call him that now.
I have friends we called Topper and Bottle in high school (30+ years ago) who still respond to those names. Oh, and Spit and Toad, too.
My husbands stage name has pretty much become his given name. Almost no one calls him Paul and he’s commonly referred to as Av.
So I never met this guy but a few years ago I was the team leader for my IT Support team and one of the Jr. techs had a new coworker to set up. He was going to be a field account exec for our federal team selling to whichever military customers were in his area and apparently he was well know by all of them as Chicken Fat.
I have no idea why and just hearing that it sounds stupid but who am I to judge? Since he was so well known as Chicken Fat he requested that his email address show as such and his director approved and asked IT for it. The Jr. tech (a contractor) was very wary about making that his name in Active Directory and everything so asked me about it. My thought was that if he’s known as that and he’s stupid enough to want the alias and his director is OK with it, then make it his email address. In AD, you can make a bunch of secondary email addresses all go to the same user so it would be easy to give him a normal username and email and then add the stupid one so the new coworker is satisfied. I don’t think he actually started working for us, or if he did he didn’t last long, which made the whole exercise pointless.
Guy nicknamed ‘Kenny.’ His first name was ‘David’ and neither his middle nor last names had any resemblance to ‘Ken’ or any of its variations.
Another guy nicknamed ‘Tom.’ First name was ‘Charles,’ and neither his middle name nor his last name had any resemblance to ‘Tom’ or any of its variations.
‘Scottie:’ First name really ‘John’
A woman nicknamed ‘Dick.’ First name was ‘Doris.’ Middle, maiden, and married names not remotely resembling 'Dick.
Nicknames of some of my schoolmates: Tang, Speedy, Foot, Popeye, Hot Dog, Hot Shot, Budweiser, Speedy, Juicy, Doe, Bullcat, Duck, Kang. No idea of the origin of any of them.
I knew a “Meatball” - no idea how he got the nickname.
Also a 'Mudflap" - he had an exceptionally large tongue.
One of the more well known is William Christopher “Dabo” Swinney, the head football coach at Clemson University. The story is that his younger brother couldn’t/wouldn’t say his name and instead called him “That boy”, which came out in toddlerese as Dabo.
The barber who gave me my first haircut (and many, many more over the years) was known to all as Peanut.
I played rugby either with or against all of the following people:
Chainsaw
Cosby
Eraserhead
Fish
Fro
Octopus
Scooby
Stitch
Stump
Walgreens
and many, many others. Most of them I have no idea what their real names are.
A college friend of mine, whose real name was Scott, was known to pretty much everyone as “Squid”. I don’t know where the nickname came from, but a lot of his casual acquaintances only knew him by Squid. He was an accounting major, and after graduating, he went to work at a Big Eight accounting firm (there were, in fact, eight, in those days); from that point forward, he was “Scott”, and he was rather embarrassed when old friends would call him Squid.
Another college friend, whose real name was David, went by “Sod”. The backstory there was that he was an avid golfer, and had been a caddy in high school (he was an Evans Scholar), and “Sod” was short for “Sodbuster”, apparently reference to a tendency to tear large divots out of the fairway. As with Squid, everyone knew him as Sod; my roommate had only ever heard me refer to him by that name, and had never met him; she assumed that his name was “Saad”, and that he was Arabic (he was, in fact, just a white Wisconsin guy of Belgian descent).
A colleague of mine is Dabo’s cousin (and quite close to him), and that’s the etymology of the name which he gives, as well.
Another few I’ve remembered:
My grad-school roommate’s mother was known to everyone as “Batch”. I can’t remember what her actual name was (though I do recall that it was a “normal” name for a woman born in the 1940s); “Batch” was a nickname which she’d picked up as a young woman, and it was short for “bachelor”; it had something to do with a guy she had dated at one point, before she started dating the man she eventually married.
A childhood friend of mine, whose given name was Steve, went by “Beaver” as a kid. When he was a baby, his father would call him “Stever the Beaver,” which was quickly shortened to “Beaver,” and it stuck. This lasted until he was 12 or 13, when he (and his friends) came to realize the alternate definition of the word “beaver”…from that point forward, he was just Steve.
Mrs. FtG once worked with a woman universally known as “Smitty”. You can figure out what her story was from that.
Do these guys go through their lives with virtually everyone calling them Walgreens, Octopus, etc? Or are these merely their ‘rugby nicknames’?
mmm
When I was 5, my next door neighbour, who while no relation I called Uncle Tony nicknamed me Fossil. He said that one day he would explain why he called me that, sadly he died before he ever did.
I’m 37 now and with that branch of my “family” the name has stuck. Nobody knows why he chose to call me that but I like it, it reminds me of him and I will always remember the day i was “named”.