With a name that my older sister couldn't even remember until well into my infancy, I learned early on to resign myself to a life of names that sound nothing like the one my parents gave me. By now, I have plenty, for the better and the worse.
You give someone a nickname when you like them, when you don't, when you can't remember them, when there are too many of them … Desirable or not, everyone has a nickname at some point in their life, and if you think you never have, you probably had a really good one.
So why Nick? Why not Jeffnames or Katnames or Fatsonames? Who is this Nick, and how is it possible that everyone in the English−speaking world collectively nominated him to represent the pretty common practice of altering acquaintances' names?
This was at the center of a recent debate I had with a couple of friends and perhaps an externality of too much time spent together and too little sleep. After much back−and−forth bickering, we did come to one satisfactory answer, satisfying enough to give the question a rest; clearly, Nicholas must have been the most popular boys' name when the term came about and thus Nick the most popular nickname. (It wasn't. According to a few censuses, Nicholas was up there, but William and a few others took the cake in medieval times.)
What perhaps should have occurred to us before we started patting ourselves on the back was the possibility that the nick of nickname has absolutely nothing to do with some guy named Nick. The lower case "n" with which it's spelled, for example, could have been a nice visual aid.
No, unfortunately no one was chosen as the namesake for the practice of pet naming nor is the word "nickname" a demonstration of its meaning. It comes from the Old English word "eke," which means additional, and while the word "eke name" or "ekename" did not appear until around 1300, the practice of using additional names to identify people with common first names was in wide use throughout the early middle ages since no one had last names.
We see the remnants of eke names today in history books and most surnames. Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, for example, are some of the best known eke names worldwide, and your last name probably derives from something similar. If you're a Mr. or Ms. Miller, your great−great−(etc.) grandfather may have been known on the street as Samuel the Miller; if you're a Klein, your ancestors may have been short … in Germany; if you're a Mac or a Mc'Something, your ancestors probably didn't do anything too cool because their eke names simply named them "son of..." I like to think that all the Steins of the world had grandparents who liked to party, but then again I also came up with the Nicholas hypothesis.
As for the eke name's transformation into the "nickname," over time what happened to quite a few English words −− especially nouns that blend easily into the articles that precede them −− happened to eke. That is misdivisions. The neke name sacrificed its "n" to the article it was most commonly used with, most likely "an," and through this process, called metanalysis, "an eke name" became "a neke name."
It may seem like a crazy mistake for so many medieval people to be making, but among a people learning language completely aurally, it's not terribly surprising. And words resulting from misdivisions pop up more frequently in the English language than one might think; "an apron," once upon a time, was "a napron."
Besides, we're talking about people who jabbed each other with sticks on horses to get their dates. I wouldn't put it past them.
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Romy Oltuski is a junior majoring in English. She can be reached at Romy.Oltuski@tufts.edu.
