What’s in a nick name?

I came across a photo my cousin posted of herself with another cousin of ours on Instagram captioned, ‘Sticks and Squid’. I smiled as I instinctively knew which one was which. The nickname Sticks is new to me, whereas Squid is not too far removed from the nickname we used back in the day, Squiff or Squiffy. Sobriquets are an interesting form of family code, and to be honest, I’ve had a lot of fun unravelling who’s who. Now that I know about Sticks, it’s only right that Sticks’ name should stick, right?

Sticks’ late father and my father are brothers who used to call each other ‘Nip’ and ‘Crack’, often interchangeably. My father told me that ‘Nip’ was common for ‘boy’, but my uncle Dirk elaborated further, telling me that ‘Nipper’ was traditionally a name for the youngest son, a term adopted from Victorian businesses who had errand boys called ‘nippers’*. Naturally it was shortened to ‘Nip’ and became a common for issuing family instructions to the youngest. 

Nip! Go and fetch the paper

I wasn’t able to elicit a story from my father about the origins of ‘Crack’ except for a cheeky smile, and it’s not the first time I’ve asked this question.  Sticks’ father, according to the faithful footy annals online, was known as ‘Fearless’ and ‘Filthy’ [1] on the football field when he was a rangy left-footed wingman for Hawthorn Football Club in the 1960s and 70s, but he was most famously attributed to being the one who named Dermott Brereton, ‘The Kid’, when, as a coach to the Under 19s he berated a player and threatened to replace him with “the kid over there” [2].

Twins, Cynthia and Maureen depicted as the sun and moon.

Squid’s mother is called Moon and the story goes that her mother, Dot, often shortened my aunt’s name from Maureen to ‘Maurn’ or ‘Maunie’, which over time became ‘Mun’, and then later morphed into ‘Moon’. To this day, it is a true moniker, since many don’t even know Moon’s Christian name. Moon’s twin, Cindy, as she called herself (as too her immediate family), was Cyn to Moon and my family. Cyn always called Moon, ‘Mun’, and their father, Jack could never tell them apart, so they were always ‘the girls’ to him. A childhood photograph of the girls proved prophetic as they were dressed up as a sun and moon, and perhaps it was one of the rare occasions Jack could tell them apart.

Moon’s husband, Dirk, (sometimes Dirko to us), was as I distinctly recall, Pud to my grandfather Jack, but Dirk didn’t agree with this, he said to me that Jack would call anyone Pud. Dear old Jacko, as we now often refer to him, would also say ‘poor little waif’ and he had a fond method for naming his grandchildren depending on the pecking order of their birth, so I was known as number nine. To this day, the family (immediate and extended) has always called me Kimbo, but there’s Manth, Matty, Susie, Joey, and Jag, but not all childhood names have stood the test of time. Number one refuses to go by the name he was called as a kid, but sometimes it still slips out, sorry Cammy. Other nicknames have come to cousins as adults who missed out as kids, so there’s GG and Lou and Jez, and possibly others I haven’t heard.

Partial Meagher family tree charting nicknames.

Nicknames go back further than my cousins and our parents. The family archives attest they were embedded deep in the family lore of my grandfather’s generation. I’ve formed a family tree chart by nick names so I could identify who was Lee-Pup, Hooker, Bumper, Liffer and Fizz. My grandfather was easy as he was always known as Jack, although for a time, my grandmother called him by his second name John. My grandmother to me was Gran, but to everyone else she was known as Dot, although to Jack as Dorry and to my father as Doll. My grandfather and his brothers called their father, my great grandfather, Pup, Pate and Pater. The latter two, Latin for father, were more formal versions at a time when Latin was used both in school and in church, whereas Pup is clearly a term of endearment bordering on a nickname. My grandfather was five years old when his mother, my great grandmother unexpectedly died in her late 40s, but some old photographs have an annotation of her name on verso, ’Catherine Sophia (Aunt Kitty)’ and it is not lost on me in my mapping of the family tree, that the nicknames that sit proudly at the top, are Pup and Kitty.

I looked up the origin of nickname and found more Latin. It originated from ‘eke name’, in which ‘eke’ means ‘addition’ although later misinterpreted to be ‘neke-name’ in the 15^th century, morphing into the word as we know it today, nick name. A tripartite evolution taking centuries unlike the transition from ‘Maurnie’ to ‘Mun’ to ‘Moon’ in a couple of decades. Sticks tells me that Squid morphed from Squif over the years, so I am wondering if there is yet another transition for Squid to come?

With this family pedigree of eke names spanning 120 years, putting family witticisms, terms of endearments and curious quirks to paper (figuratively speaking these days), all I need now is a flurry of new neke names to carry forward this fine family line over the next generation.

*For a different take on nippers, head to this story about Nippers and Heroes featuring Moon’s intrepid open water swimming.

Footnotes

[1] https://www.bigfooty.com/forum/threads/real-names-and-nick-names.669428/page-5

[2] https://www.theroar.com.au/2021/11/22/afl-top-100-nicknames-30-to-21/