Bobby ‘The Golden Jet’ Hull was a decorative nickname but not practical during play for his Winnipeg Jets teammates. Bruce Bennett / Getty Images
Bobby ‘The Golden Jet’ Hull was a decorative nickname but not practical during play for his Winnipeg Jets teammates. Bruce Bennett / Getty Images
Bobby ‘The Golden Jet’ Hull was a decorative nickname but not practical during play for his Winnipeg Jets teammates. Bruce Bennett / Getty Images
Bobby ‘The Golden Jet’ Hull was a decorative nickname but not practical during play for his Winnipeg Jets teammates. Bruce Bennett / Getty Images

What’s in a nickname? Depends in NHL if it is Homeric or hyprocristic


  • English
  • Arabic

Who would you rather have on your team: Gino and Sid the Kid, Tazer and Sharpie, or Dewey and Quickie?

Those would be Evgeni Malkin and Sidney Crosby of the Pittsburgh Penguins, Jonathan Toews and Patrick Sharp of the Chicago Blackhawks, and Drew Doughty and Jonathan Quick of the Los Angeles Kings.

Hockey nicknames are surely the most quaint in sport.

Like the players, they tend to be simple rather than eloquent. Along with Zambonis and missing teeth, they form part of the game’s prosaic charm.

It has been widely observed, in Canada, that hockey nicknames tend to come in two forms.

One, you take the first part of the guy’s first or last name, then add “-er” at the end.

Two, you take the first part of the first or last name, but add “-ie”.

But that is not the whole story.

For an explanation of this system of nomenclature, we turn to a 2006 paper in the journal American Speech by Robert Kennedy of the University of California at Santa Barbara and Tania Zamuner, now of the University of Ottawa.

They note that “discussions of athlete nicknames in the academic domain are not known to us other than our own previous work on the subject,” that being a 2001 paper.

They begin their more recent paper by broadly dividing nicknames into two types: the hypocoristic, such as Sharpie and Quickie, and the Homeric, such as Sid the Kid.

Players tend to use the former, and sports writers and announcers the latter. In the Iliad, Homer refers repeatedly to “swift-footed Achilles” and “flashing-eyed Athena”.

At the rink, other nicknames along these lines have included The Great Gretzky (Wayne Gretzky), The Golden Jet (Bobby Hull), The Chicoutimi Cucumber (Georges Vezina), Le Gros Tou Tou (Serge Bernier), Sideshow Bob (Darcy Tucker) and Chris “Mad Dog” Kelly.

Whereas the Homeric names are decorative, the hypocoristics are functional.

If you wanted Gretzky to pass you the puck, you would do better to alert him with a shout of “Gretz!” than with one of “The Great Gretzky!”.

To this end, the authors note that hypocoristics “are never more than two syllables”.

Alas, the statistical part of their paper does not answer the question of whether “-er” or “-ie” is the most common suffix in hockey nicknames.

Taken together, though, such “vocalic suffix” usages accounted for 52.4 per cent of the 1,734 nicknames in the study.

The “-s” suffix sound, as in Gretz, was used in 9.4 per cent of cases.

Surprisingly, 38.1 per cent of nicknames did not have a suffix at all, but instead were shortened versions of the player’s name, such as Fish for Fisher or Cass for Cassels.

Other examples in recent times include Kip, Mess, Pop, Quack, Tik and Yash.

rmckenzie@thenational.ae

Follow us on Twitter at SprtNationalUAE

The details

Heard It in a Past Life

Maggie Rogers

(Capital Records)

3/5

THE BIO

Born: Mukalla, Yemen, 1979

Education: UAE University, Al Ain

Family: Married with two daughters: Asayel, 7, and Sara, 6

Favourite piece of music: Horse Dance by Naseer Shamma

Favourite book: Science and geology

Favourite place to travel to: Washington DC

Best advice you’ve ever been given: If you have a dream, you have to believe it, then you will see it.

MATCH INFO

Day 1 at Mount Maunganui

England 241-4

Denly 74, Stokes 67 not out, De Grandhomme 2-28

New Zealand 

Yet to bat

The specs

Engine: 3.8-litre twin-turbo flat-six

Power: 650hp at 6,750rpm

Torque: 800Nm from 2,500-4,000rpm

Transmission: 8-speed dual-clutch auto

Fuel consumption: 11.12L/100km

Price: From Dh796,600

On sale: now

F1 The Movie

Starring: Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, Javier Bardem

Director: Joseph Kosinski

Rating: 4/5

What are the influencer academy modules?
  1. Mastery of audio-visual content creation. 
  2. Cinematography, shots and movement.
  3. All aspects of post-production.
  4. Emerging technologies and VFX with AI and CGI.
  5. Understanding of marketing objectives and audience engagement.
  6. Tourism industry knowledge.
  7. Professional ethics.
The%20Roundup
%3Cp%3EDirector%3A%20Lee%20Sang-yong%3Cbr%3EStars%3A%20Ma%20Dong-seok%2C%20Sukku%20Son%2C%20Choi%20Gwi-hwa%3Cbr%3ERating%3A%204%2F5%3C%2Fp%3E%0A