Following our earlier conversation about nicknames, listeners are still responding with stories about their own nicknames. Two of those show how nicknames sometimes arise from a single incident, then stick around for years. In one story, a girl...
Our conversation about women who use the nicknames Gertie or Gert as jokingly affectionate terms for each other, prompted a listener in Melbourne, Australia, to speculate that it’s a nod to Gertrude Lawrence, an English performer who rose to...
Lana in Evansville, Indiana, says all the women in her family affectionately call each other Gert or Gertie. She has discovered that one of her friends also uses the name Gertie as a term of endearment for the women in her own family. Although in...
A listener shares a story about how she went from hating the nickname her grandmother bestowed on her to regarding it with fondness many years later. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Learning to Love a Nickname”...
After our conversation about the word nickname, a listener shares the story of a guy who earned the nickname Blister because he always “shows up when the work is done.” This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of ““Blister”...
The verb to eke, as in to eke out a living or eke out a win, derives from Old English eaca, meaning “addition” or “supplement.” The expression an eke name, or literally “an additional name” was later altered by misdivision into neke name, and...