A non-native English speaker asked me why Dick is a nickname for Richard. After confessing my complete ignorance, I promised him I would forward his question to the great collective. Does anyone know this?
Mitch
Just a wag, but maybe the progression is…
Richard>Rich>Rick>Dick?
May have something to do with the British habit of rhyming nicknames.
See: This column.
I think postcards is right.
Apart from the ones mentioned in the article I can also think of Bob (Robert), Ned (Edwin), Ted (Edward - [sub][sup]more likely Theodore in the US[/sup][/sub]), Nan (Anne), Nell (Helen) and Dobbin (Robert/Robin). Some of these are obsolete or old fashioned - I’ve only ever heard of Dobbin used as a name for a horse. It’s not only a British thing either; Beppe can be a familiar form of Giuseppe and I’m sure there are others.
Why do we do this? I don’t have a cite but my guess is that its related to the habit of short/familiar forms of names tending to disguise the longer name they come from. Another way of doing this is by not choosing the first syllable: Tony for Anthony, Sandy (Alexander), Liam (William), Trish (Patricia), Dolph (Adolph/Adolphus), Toto (Salvatore) etc. Of course some of these are so common that they don’t really disguise the source name much.
And Jack is “short” for John.
Jack is actually short for Johnathon.
Peg (or Peggy) for Margaret is another one.
Spanish has some strange ones:
Chuey for Jesus
Pepe for Jose
Pancho for Francisco
Haj
One of the strangest is Chuck for Charles.
I wonder about that, too.
Maybe we primates just like saying “uck”?
buck, Chuck, duck, f…, guck, Huck, j., k., luck, muck, n.
puck, q., ruckus,
suck, stuck, struck, shuck, etc.
w., x. yuck., z.
That’s a lot of ‘ucks’. Left out the vowels, of course.
Really? Not in my experience. My drivers license says John, but I go by Jack. Same for my father, and his father.
I don’t believe that this is peculiar to my family–President Kennedy was named John, and was called Jack. Same for Shakespeare’s Falstaff.
How do we get Hank from Henry is what I want to know. The Dutch get Henk from Hendrik as well.
I think this post explains itself; I see ‘Henk’ as an abbrieviation of ‘Hendrik’, namely “Hen’k”; then a logical progression into the english translation.
But how DO we go from John to Jack. Hank is a nickname for Henry. But Jack is a name in its own right.
Also, re: José (Joseph) to Pepe. The most common explanation is that it’s short for Pater Putatibus - putative father. It even creeps in to scholarly works. I have, however, when searching the web, found sources who say that this is [old] urban legend and just a little to good to be true. Maybe something for Cecil.
Pepe is basically P.P. (pe pe), which stands for “padre putativo”. José was the putative father of Jesús.
http://www.el-mundo.es/larevista/num194/textos/nombres.html
As for Jesús, the nickname can be Chus, Chucho, Chusito…and so on.
Basically in Spanish baby talk, a s becomes a ch and a p becomes an F. So Franco or Francisco becomes Pancho or Paco.
We’ve done this one before. Note my own brilliant contribution. It’s baby talk.
cuate
re: Pepe. This site has another opinion, as I wrote before. My guess is that you know Castellano. If not, let me know and I’ll translate it.
To return to the original question. The name Richard came to Britain with the Normans (11th Century).
This site tells us why Richard then became Dick
http://www.behindthename.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?terms=dick&nmd=n
and Bill for William?
I agree. Chuck is the weirdest.
I wanna know how the got Beaver out of Theodore (Leave it to Beaver show).
Cnote, review my post and I think it will become self-explanatory.
Awww, blast from the past AHunter3. Cool (It’s frightening, however, to see how many of those people have been banned. Sheesh.) But it was fun reading.
Nicknames. Got it.
Kind of down the lines of the Dick Trickle thing, if you ask me, but people are people.