I was driving to Tucson last month and passed a billboard for the U.S. Border Patrol and there was a big picture of a guy we’ll call, Ernesto Guevera. Under aliases, it listed “The Axe,” “Spike” and “Che.” Guys have nicknames, women usually do not.
Sure, there are some folks we see in those very old Hollywood upper-crust movies where the woman are Bitsy, Mitzie and Muffy but that’s not real life. Usually.
My sister-in-law Lori is Lori, my niece is Lisa and my mother-in-law Joan is..well, Joan. But I’m sometimes The Klugs, my friend Jim is Jimbo, Marshall is The Guru and Steve is Moose. I once worked with a guy we called Skip, but he didn’t know why until we told him: the family smarts seem to have skipped a generation.
I asked my wife Hope if she had a nickname growing up and she said No. She said, “it’s not feminine.” I suspect that she really believes guys need a touch of masculinity added to their personas and if anyone ever called her Blondie, she’d eye them suspiciously and say “Excuse Me?!” And that’s because one week she IS blonde, the next blond-ish and the next, blondish strawberry.
I always admired mob figures where guys were called Tony Two Ducks, Vinny the Chin, Joe Bananas, and Benjamin Siegel (don’t ever call him Bugsy!).
Male/female duos are always called The Honeymoon Killers, Ken and Barbie (for real), The Lonely Hearts Killers, or something romantic like that, (exception: Bonnie & Clyde), but the women usually get away with maintaining their genteelness, escaping labels and I don’t think it’s fair.
There was Machine Gun Kelly and Scarface Capone, but Ma Barker? Where’s the imagination in that? Clearly, she was someone’s mother!
Except for Bono and Elvis, men don’t often have one-word names as women do. There’s Rhianna, Lizzo, Pink, Beyonce’, Madonna, Cher, Brittany, and Shakira but those are unusual names. I doubt Bob Seger wants to be known as Bobby, but Springsteen is still known as Bruuuuce. I don’t understand. I’m very confused.
At sports banquets, we honor “The Coach,” “T-Bone,” “The Fridge,” “Dr. J” and “Front-Line Larry,” but it’s still Martina, Steffi, Oksana, or Annika. Someone snuck in a Flojo once, and Venus is a planet, not a name.
Frank was Ol’ Blue Eyes, Mel Torme’ the Velvet Fog, Humphrey Bogart was Bogie and Samuel Hopkins was ‘Lightnin’. But we still have Meryl, not The Streeper and except for a Babs now and then, it’s still Barbra. Liza is a whole other story. Bennifer? That is just plain wrong.
My friend Meryl is sometimes Mer, but Les is Garman and Lee somehow became Jarl. Still working on that one.
Maybe men have a problem because familiarity breeds…something.. and I for one, don’t know what it is. When men are being yelled out, they are always called by their first, full names.
Whenever I hang out at the cigar store, I run into the regulars like Stand Up Jim (he never sat down), Polish Larry, Huge Hefner (a portly gentleman), Boston Jack, and The Maestro, who was the principal conductor of the Phoenix Symphony.. Because I write, I have alternated between The Poet and The Scribe, but the name I always wanted there was Robusto de Corona.
My Starbucks friends still use their regular names. We need to do something about that.
When Hope calls me Bar, I know it’s out of affection. But when she intones ‘Barry’, I know she thinks I did something wrong. And she’s sometimes right. I once spied her across a crowded reception one evening and to help her locate where I was, I yelled: “Over Here Ho!”
That was the last time I did that.
Love that
"I'm done with the nicknames. Actually, when I obtain my doctorate, I will not allow people to call me Shaq anymore, either." Shaquille O'Neal