No More Nicknames?
By STRIX YOUR nickname (in the unlikely event of your having one) is your eke-name : eke meaning `also,' like auch in German, and the 'n' having got itself attached by the same thoughtless pro- cess which turned an eft into a newt.
Originally, I suppose, nicknames were func- tional appendages. In the Dark Ages people had only one pukka name of their own, and the supply of these names was limited, the interplay of cultures not yet having made available from Greece, Rome, Hollywood and elsewhere the wide choice of nomenclature which we now take for granted. Even in comparatively recent times one of our ancestors, greeting a neighbour with 'Heard the latest about Ethelred?' was liable to cause confusion and misunderstanding since the telephone directory was full of people called Ethelred. It was thus convenient as well as con- gruous that the most notable of them should be known as Ethelred the Unready; and it seems fair to assume that many of his humbler name- sakes had their own eke-names too—Ethelred the Fat, Ethelred the Voluble, Ethelred the Ambi- dextrous and so on.
Of course we do not know this for certain, at least I do not. But it seems quite likely.
* * * As time went on men, in this part of the world anyhow, acquired surnames and Christian names, and the nickname lost its original raison d'etre. It became a frivolous and arbitrary embellish- ment, sometimes descriptive or allusive, some- times owing its derivation to a trivial, half- forgotten episode of early youth. Some nicknames were kindly, almost . honorific, like Capability Brown's. Some were cruel. High among these I rate that attached (so his contemporaries aver) for the rest of his life to a youth who killed his father in a shooting accident; he was known as 'Bagdad.'
In our card-indexed age, when we are all so much graph-fodder, so many numbers in the files of the National Health Service, the Inland Revenue and other authorities, one would have expected the cult of the nickname to flourish. It has, instead, withered. Other trappings of the Edwardian era (which I believe to have been its heyday) have been brought back-into vogue; nicknames have been left on the shelf.
One obvious cause of their desuetude is the widespread use of Christian names at boys' schools. Although a nickname is not the same as a pet name, it has a somewhat similar function in that its purpose is to personalise, to lessen for- mality. The impulse to call Snooks minor 'Tad- pole' (or whatever it may be) is weakened if you already know him as George. Fifty years ago it seemed natural that, to the close-knit, sophisti- cated triumvirate of which he was the head, Corkran should always be 'Stalky' and that we shbuld not even be told what any of their Christian names were; today we recognise this convention as badly dated local colour.
* * * Save, T imagine, in madly progressive schools, the boys do not call the masters by their Christian iE names, so there must be some other and more recondite reason for the fact (such my researches suggest it to be) that masters are no longer being given the enduring, time-proof nicknames which they used to bear with them to their graves and even, beyond. the grave, into their obituaries. Tunny Headlam, Bunny Hare, Piggy Hill, Satan Ford—these lapidary, built-in sobriquets are not, I think, replicated in the Eton of today; and I am told that elsewhere a similar downward trend is evident in the eke-names of pedagogues.
1 find this curious, and rather sad, It is perhaps preferable to a contrary state of affairs (though this would be more readily explicable) in which a sudden craze for nicknames made them almost obligatory, and everybody started coining his own. But in moderation nicknames strike me as pleasantly grotesque adornments, like gar- goyles. We inherit our surnames, and in the choice of our Christian names we have no say. But our nickname we earn, for better or for worse. Even if it is, or originally was, pejorative, it is proof that we have made some kind of a mark, that the world has taken note of us. Forty years hence Tadpole Snooks will live in more memories (for whatever that is worth) than G. R. L. Snooks. I am sorry to think that eke- names are on their way out.
I acquired one on arrival at my private school, and was called by it until I left four years later.
It was ingloilbtisly earned. A sickly child, I was still, at the age of nine, on the tail end of a diet, and was specifically forbidden to eat suet. The opportunity to do so occurred. twice a week at luncheon, when great Zeppelin-shaped puddings were cut up into narrow slices moistened by half a teaspoonful of treacle and served to the ravenous pupils. The First War was raging, our fare was sub-Spartan, and these tepid grey seg- ments were regarded as something of a gastronomic highlight. While everyone else wolfed them, I had a plate of slops.
It may be that at first I hotly resented being called Pudding, but a merciful oblivion now ob- scures the initiatory phase and I remember my nickname with affection. No doubt it would have been nice to have been called Pole-axe or Yorker or The Demon; but such names take a bit of living up to and can all too easily acquire a sar- donic, double-edged ring. Not so Pudding. It is not a sobriquet which inspires respect, but nor is it one to generate envy or malice. 'It's time we took Pudding down a peg. . . .' Nobody is ever likely to mutter that, for Pudding is down a peg already. If a boy is mildly ridiculous anyhow, you don't make his lot any worse by giving him a mildly ridiculous nickname; in fact, you make it better.
At least that is what I found; and a future to which nicknames are no longer going to make their small contribution of panache or humour or inconsequence seems to me needlessly lack- lustre.
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