What the hell are nicknames for?  I've just been completely unable to decipher their hidden meaning, if indeed there is one.  I was walking home yesterday evening and two trenchcoat clad businessmen walked huddled against the rain towards me.  One trenchcoat was black, the other grey.  As I passed, black said to grey:  

"Jaysus, I thought you were a little bit hard on Rochey there this evening".  Grey replied: 

"Rochey?  Nah, he'll be alright".  

Why was their friend called Rochey?  I assumed Rochey was a person whose surname was Roche, or something more posh like Rochford. But I had a friend with a surname of Roche, and we had a very different nickname for him.

My first attempt to explain the purpose of nicknames proposed that they were abbreviations of a longer surname.  But I quickly smacked myself for being so mislead.  The very example above disproves the theory, Rochey being marginally longer than Roche.  I pulled on countless other examples to confirm the theory's falsity.  I had a friend in school called Sylvester.  We called him Syl for short.  But sometimes we called him Sylly Billy, abandoning the intended utility of the shorter nickname.  In moments of extreme giddiness, brought on by comsuming a whole bag of Jelly Tots or going up to the "Big Boy's Yard" for a chase or talking about something dirty like girl's bras, we might loose the run of ourselves altogether and call him Sylly Billy Dilly Jilly Rilly Willy Head.  The word "Head" acted as a sort of punctuation mark signalling the end of the nickname and the beginning of the time to start sidesplitting laughter that often left streams of pee running down the legs of a schoolboys pants.  The magnitute of the laughter produced by the nicknames was proportional to its length.  So you can well imagine that this particular one offered infinite opportunity for a young boy to do his laughing glands an injury.

So nicknames are not solely used to shorten a name.  Can they be then, a term of endearment or affection?  Certainly when a husband refers to his wife as Honey or Sweetheart or, if he's in the pub with the lads, The Missus, it is intended as such.  But nicknames can also contain sentiment other than affection.  I had another friend in school that had eyes that protruded fantastically.  They bulged out a good 1/4 of an inch more than a normal individual's, as if his brain was trying to evict them.  We called him Popeye and he certainly was not endeared by the title.  I was affected quite badly by acne and as known as The Pizza Monster.  Neither was I endeared by such a title, and I wondered how Popeye and Sylly Billy could be so cruel.  So nicknames could be other than terse forms of surnames or doting titles.  I had still to find the nickname's essence.

Some examples I recalled caused me to propose that they are used to associate a deed or characteristic with a person.  For example rugby players, especially if they have a touch of the rough element, may earn themselves a title like Slugger, Thumper or Knuckles.  Those that bite ears at the bottom of rucks may get christened Tyson.  An acquaintence of mine, who lost a testicle in a street fight to have it replaced by a plastic replica, was known as The One Ball Bandit.  He opened up a chipper and had the misfortune to call it Tasty Takeaway.  Its slogan amongst the populace soon evolved to: "Go to Teste Takeaway - you'll have a ball".  I could find little evidence to the contrary, so it seemed irrefutable that nicknames were used as a verbal caricature of an individual.  But again, this was not the sole purpose of a nickname.

So where did all this leave me in my search for the fundamental meaning of nicknames?  It left me with little choice but to change my focus from the nickname itself to the person bestowing it.  A person is seldom lucky enough to choose their nickname.  It is bestowed to them at the bestower's whim and for the bestower's pleasure.  Beauty is said to be in the eye of the beholder.  Similarily, the purpose of a nickname is in the mind of the baptist.  The Platonic Form of a nickname is the pleasure it brings the creator.