The nickname of the game
Or, James McBride’s kaleidoscopic characters
We all have names we don’t know about and don’t want to hear. So wrote Martin Amis, known as Little Keith to his friends and Smarty Anus to his detractors. But what if it goes the other way? What happens when the nicknames are all we hear?
That’s the world of James McBride’s intoxicating 2020 novel Deacon King Kong, the title of which is a nickname for a nickname for the hero, Cuffy Lambkin.
His first-order nickname is Sportcoat, a title that you’d think has something to do with his jacket but actually dates back to a folk medicine cure put on him as a child, after which his mother couldn’t call him by his true name for eight months, leading her to name him after “a term she’d overheard while pulling cotton at the farm of J. C. Yancy of Barnwell County, where she worked shares, one of her white bosses uttering it to refer to his shiny new green-and-white-plaid sport coat, which he proudly wore the very afternoon he bought it, cutting a dazzling figure atop his horse in the harsh Southern sun, his shotgun across his lap, dozing up on his mount at the end of the cotton row while the colored workers laughed up their sleeves and the other overseers snickered.”
Deacon King Kong is full of bursting sentences like that and crackling dialogue like this:
“You got a face for swim trunk ads”
“If I was a fly and wanted to get to heaven, I’d throw myself in your mouth.”
“Better to be a fat man in a graveyard than a thin man in a stew.”
“He stole a cat from the circus, except it wasn’t no cat. It got big, whatever it was, so he shot it.”
“The way he drinks, solid food makes a splash in his stomach when he eats it.”
What does it all mean? Sometimes context helps, sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s always entertaining. Just like a good nickname.
If you’re desperate for a new handle and the Wu-Tang Name Generator website is down, you might consider a stint in prison. To study big house sobriquets in their 2014 paper Nicknames in Prison: Meaning and Manipulation in Inmate Monikers, two education professors teamed up with a gentleman serving time in Arizona State Prison.
The first rule of prison nicknames, as learned by a new arrival with a horse-like sneeze:
“He thinks he’ll be called Gizmo, the nickname he grew up with, but he doesn’t yet understand prison nicknames. You don’t get to make up your own. From now on we have a Seabiscuit on the yard!”
If you’re tall and skinny, you’re Ichabod; if you love country music, you’re Cowboy; if you’re perpetually in a bad mood, you’re Happy; if you’re covered with burns from a meth lab mishap, you’re either Torch or Crispy; and when you work in the cafeteria, you start out as Fish Stick but can aspire to one day becoming Pork Chop.
Personally, I much prefer nicknames that make no sense, even when you hear the complete explanation.
Many years ago, my friend Justin was eating breakfast with a group of pals at a diner. He noticed an untouched plate of toast on the table and asked if he might lay claim to it. For that innocuous request, he is known to this day as Toast. The wonderfully inadequate reasoning is just part of the charm.
And that’s how McBride’s characters are nicknamed.Why does Sportcoat call that old lady Miss Four Pie? Well, “she had four hot blueberry pies in her oven first day I come on the job. That whole house was stinking of blueberries.” And so the stink stuck.
The more nicknames you maintain, the more roles you likely play in the lives of others. And given that people with stronger social connections live longer, we might extrapolate that nicknames are good for your health. They directly prolong Sportcoat’s life in Deacon King Kong. And as his friend Hot Sausage explains:
“The Bible says Jesus had many names.”
“Well golly, Sausage, where’s it say in the Bible that you’re Jesus?”
“I ain’t said I was Jesus. I said I ain’t stuck with just one name.”
“Well, how many names you got?” Sister Gee demanded.
“How many do a colored man need in this world?”
Sister Gee rolled her eyes.
Why not share this Issue with Oggie, Fishfingers, and your other nicknamed friends?
And if you’re the nicknamee, or would like to be, why not subscribe?
Your Half Jokes, Doubled
Those who know me know my DMs are always open to half jokes. If I can’t find the other half, I may yet be able to trade them for three-eights of a metaphor, 80% of a sight gag, or a rusty bucketful of musings, depending on market rates.
And so I was grateful to longtime GWQstan Blake for this one:
“Not many gen Z’ers know this, but #yeet is actually pronounced the British way, #yate.”
Followed up with:
“Needs work I know. Maybe it should just be WilliamButlerYeets.”
Cue the breakdown: “Yeet” is a multipurpose exclamation that dates back to mid-2000s dance videos and returned to prominence in 2014 as something you yell when you’re throwing an empty can of soda into a crowd.
William Butler Yeats is an Irish poet most famous for the grim non-rhymer “The Second Coming,” probably the most referenced poem of the twentieth century thanks to lines like “things fall apart” and “The best lack all conviction, while the worst throw cans of soda into crowds.”
And William Butler Yeets, a quick Twitter search reveals, is the username for at least 10 other accounts.
I messaged them all, demanding satisfaction. Specifically, I wrote:
Hello there! I’m surveying all the William Butler Yeets out there with this one question: What are *you* slouching toward?
The winning answer at press time came from the William Butler Yeets behind @CptBaker:
A weekend, a vaccine, and the eternal promise of ‘better things yet to come’
Case closed!
That was Issue No. 82 of GWQ, yeeted directly from the hoosegow. They call me Newsletter around these parts; tell your friends. The centre usually holds. Never forget that Donald Glover found the name Childish Gambino on the Wu-Tang Name Generator, and that from this day forward Get Wit Quick will also be known as Intellectual Killah. There are no other names for Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting, though love has many aliases, including the ♥️ below.
For the record, he did eat an ungodly amount of toast that morning.