Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/134350
The Art of Manliness Continued equivocality." Meeting these requirements and coming up with a good nickname isn't easy, which is why the man who does so gets kudos from the others. As discussed above, many male nicknames are mocking in nature, and the largest percentage of them are rooted in a man's physical characteristics — particularly of the unflattering variety.As Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin noted,"Wherever men laugh and curse, particularly in a familiar environment, their speech is filled with bodily images.The body copulates, defecates, overeats, and men's speech is flooded with genitals, bellies, defecations, urine, disease, noses, mouths and dismembered parts." The popularity of body-part nicknames in groups of men speaks to another one of their purposes: tension-reducer. Especially important for tight-knit groups under stress. Nicknames evoke laughter because of their contrast with more formal modes of address, their common use of phonemic repetition ("Mama McKay"), and, because body parts can be pretty funny. Insulting nicknames based on a man's physical qualities also serve to emphasize the distinct maleness of the group — one cannot imagine female friends calling a big-nosed girl in the group "Birdie" or an overweight one "Chubs," without causing deep offense and hurt feelings. But unflattering physical attributes are not the only fodder for nicknames — they can come from a variety of sources of inspiration.And it is possible to earn that most desirable of male nicknames – a descriptive one based on one's exemplary skills. JOBS for TEAMS Why Has the Use of Nicknames Declined? | Sociologists say that the use of nicknames of all kinds has declined over the last few decades. Why is this? One final, very practical purpose of nicknames – of both the group and 24 JobsForTeams0613_manliness.indd 5 other varieties – is simply to distinguish one person from another when many individuals in a community have the same name. So, for example, they used to thrive in small villages in the Mediterranean, where surnames were few, and the tradition was to name a firstborn child after his or her parents or grandparents, or for the local Catholic patron saints. The result was a lot of people with the same names, and nicknames helped folks keep track of who was who. These days, the diversity in names is on the upswing. As The New York Times reported: "According to the Social Security Administration, the 10 most popular baby names for boys in 1956 represented 31.1 percent of the total born. In 1986, around the time many of today's athletes were born, the top 10 represented only 21.3 percent of the total. In 2010, the number dropped to 8.4 percent." With so much variation, nicknames just aren't as needed anymore. Another reason for the general decline in nicknames may be found in a culture that takes offense to things more easily than it used to. As psychology professor Cleveland Evans put it, nicknames are "humorous or non-complimentary, and we may live in a culture where people are less willing to accept names that are less complimentary." When it comes to all-male groups, the decline in nicknames can simply be traced to the decline in the existence of these kinds of groups at all.As we mentioned above, nicknames thrive in small, insular groups that offer plenty of face-to-face contact.As a group interacts less, gets bigger, and becomes penetrated by outside forces and people, nicknames disappear. The way in which this plays out can be seen by contrasting two organized crime syndicates: the Italian Mafia and the Russian Vory. In the Mafia, the organizawww.jobsforteams.com 5/7/13 11:07 AM