Words; Their Use and Abuse

by William Mathews

The word “nick” in nickname is cognate with the German word necken, to mock, to quiz, and the English word “nag,” to tease, or provoke.—W. L. Blackley, Word-Gossip.

A good name will wear out, a bad one may be turned: a nickname lasts forever.—Zimmerman.

J’ai été toujours étonné que les Familles qui portent un Nom odieux ou ridicule, ne le quitteut pas.—Bayle.

Among the books that need to be written, one of the most instructive would be a treatise on the history and influence of nicknames. Philosophers who study the great events in the world’s history, are too apt, in their eagerness to discover adequate causes, to overlook the apparently trifling means by which mankind are influenced. They are eloquent enough upon the dawning of a new idea in the world, when its effects are set forth in all the pomp of elaborate histories and disquisitions; but they would do a greater service by showing how and when, by being condensed into a pithy word or phrase, it wins the acceptance of mankind. The influence of songs upon a people in times of excitement and revolution is familiar to all. “When the French mob began to sing the Marseillaise, they had evidently caught the spirit of the revolution; and what a song is to a political essay, a nickname is to a song.” In itself such a means of influence may seem trivial; and yet history shows that it is no easy thing to estimate the force of these ingenious appellations.

The name of a man is not a mere label, which may be detached, as one detaches a label from a piece of lifeless furniture. As Goethe once feelingly said, it is not like a cloak, which only hangs about a man, and at which one may at any rate be allowed to pull and twitch; but it is a close-fitting garment, which has grown over and over him, like his skin, and which one cannot scrape and flay without injuring himself. Names not only represent certain facts or thoughts, but they powerfully mould the facts and thoughts which they represent. Men have borne names which they have felt to be stigmas, an active cause of discouragement and failure to their dying day; and they have borne names, inherited from their ancestors, which have lifted them above themselves, by bringing them into fellowship with a past of high effort or generous sacrifice.

In politics, it has long been observed that no orator can compare for a moment in effect with him who can give apt and telling nicknames. Brevity is the soul of wit, and of all eloquence a nickname is the most concise and irresistible. It is a terse, pointed, short-hand mode of reasoning, condensing a volume of meaning into an epithet, and is especially popular in these days of steam and electric telegraphs, because it saves the trouble of thinking. There is a deep instinct in man which prompts him, when engaged in any controversy, whether of tongue or pen, to assume to himself some honorable name which begs the whole matter in dispute, and at the same time to fasten on his adversary a name which shall render him ridiculous, odious, or contemptible. By facts and logic you may command the assent of the few; but by nicknames you may enlist the passions of the million on your side. Who can doubt that when, in the English civil wars, the parliamentary party styled themselves “the Godly” and their opponents “the Malignants,” the question at issue, wherever entrance could be gained for these words, was already decided? Who can estimate how much the Whig party in this country was damaged by the derisive sarcasm, “All the decency,” or its opponents by the appellation of “Locofocos”? Is it not certain that the odious name “Copperheads,” which was so early in our late civil war affixed to the northern sympathizers with the South, had an incalculable influence in gagging them, and in preventing their numbers from multiplying?

It has been truly said that in the distracted times of early revolution, any nickname, however vague, will fully answer a purpose, though neither those who are blackened by the odium, nor those who cast it, can define the hateful appellative. The historian Hume says that when the term “Delinquents” came into vogue in England, it expressed a degree and species of guilt not easily known or ascertained. It served, however, the end of those revolutionists who had coined it, by involving any person in, or coloring any action by, “delinquency”; and many of the nobility and gentry were, without any questions being asked, suddenly discovered to have committed the crime of “delinquency.” The degree in which the political opinions of our countrymen were influenced, and their feelings embittered, some forty years ago, by the appellation “Federalist,” cannot be easily estimated. The fact that many who heard the derisive title knew not its origin, and some not even its meaning, did not lessen its influence,—as an incident related by Judge Gaston of North Carolina well illustrates. In travelling on his circuit through the backwoods of that state, he learned that the people of a certain town had elected a Democrat, in place of a Whig, to serve them in the legislature. When asked the reason of this change, his informant, an honest, rough-looking citizen, replied: “Oh, we didn’t reëlect Mr. A., because he is a fetheral.” “A fetheral!” exclaimed the judge, “what is a fetheral?” “I don’t know,” was the reply, “but it ain’t a human.”

There is no man so insignificant that he may not blast the reputation of another by fastening upon him an odious or ludicrous nickname. Even the most shining character may thus be dragged down by the very reptiles of the race to the depths of infamy. A parrot may be taught to call names, and, if you have a spite against your neighbor, may be made to give him a deal of annoyance, without much wit either in the employer or the puppet. Goethe felt this when he made the remark above quoted, which was provoked by a coarse pun made on his name by Herder. Though no man could better afford to despise such a jest, it rankled, apparently, even in his great mind; for, forty years later, after Herder’s death, he spoke of it bitterly, in the course of a very kindly criticism upon that writer, as an instance of the sarcasm which often rendered him unamiable. Hotspur would have had a starling taught to speak nothing but “Mortimer” in the ears of his enemy. An insulting or degrading epithet will stick to a man long after it has been proved malicious or false. Who could dissociate with the name of Van Buren the idea of craft or cunning, after he had become known as the “Kinderhook Fox”; or who ever venerated John Tyler as the Chief Magistrate of the nation, after he had been politically baptized as “His Accidency”? Who can tell how far General Scott’s prospects for the Presidency were damaged by the contemptuous nickname of “Old Fuss and Feathers”; especially after he had nearly signed his own political death-warrant by that fatal allusion to “a hasty plate of soup,” which convulsed the nation with laughter from the St. Croix to the Rio Grande? The hero of Chippewa found it hard to breast the torrent of ridicule which this derisive title brought down upon him. It would have been easier far to stand up against the iron shock of the battle-field. Who, again, has forgotten how a would-be naval bard of America was “damned to everlasting fame” by a verbal tin-pail attached to his name in the form of one of his own verses?[39] “I have heard an eminent character boast,” says Hazlitt, “that he did more to produce the war with Bonaparte by nicknaming him ‘The Corsican,’ than all the state papers and documents on the subject put together.” “Give a dog a bad name,” says the proverb, “and you hang him.” It was only necessary to nickname Burke “The Dinner Bell,” to make even his rising to speak a signal for a general emptying of the house.

The first step in overthrowing any great social wrong is to fix upon it a name which expresses its character. From the hour when “taxation without representation” came to be regarded by our fathers as a synonym for “tyranny,” the cause of the colonies was safe. Had the southern slaves been called by no other name than that used by their masters,—namely, “servants,”—they would have been kept in bondage till they had won their freedom by the sword.