In light of these interests, we developed the nickname teasing paradigm. Nicknames are a universal, linguistic marker of intimate relations that irrepressibly emerge in healthy marriages, friendships, joking relations between uncles and nieces, and work relations. Nicknames tend to home in on quirks, foibles, and deviant qualities of the target, but provoke in a loving way by violating the rules of literal communication (see examples in table below). Nicknames systematically involve exaggeration, repetition (alliteration), and metaphor (equating the individual with an animal or food, most typically). Nicknames are place holders for escapes to the world of play and pretense, where we can critique and mock in playful fashion without causing offense.
NICKNAMES FROM SPORTS AND POLITICS
MUHAMMAD ALI
THE LOUISVILLE LIP
JOE LOUIS
THE BROWN BOMBER
ROBERTO DURAN
NO MÁS
JAKE LAMOTTA
RAGING BULL
Y. A. TITTLE
THE BALD EAGLE
SHAQUILLE O’NEAL
BIG ARISTOTLE
KEVIN MCHALE
THE BLACK HOLE
JACK NICKLAUS
THE GOLDEN BEAR
LARRY JOHNSON
GRANDMA MA
BJORN BORG
ICE BORG
JOE BRYANT
JELLY BEAN
CHRIS EVERT
LITTLE MISS POKER FACE
KEN ROSEWALL
MUSCLES
JOHN ELWAY
MR. ED
JAROMIR JAGR
PUFF NUTS
KEITH WOOD
THE RAGING POTATO
WILLIAM PERRY
THE REFRIGERATOR
CHARLES BARKLEY
THE ROUND MOUND OF REBOUND
PAU GASOL
THE SPANISH FLY
ANTHONY WEBB
SPUD
GEORGE W. BUSH
BUSH 43, DUBYA, THE SHRUB, UNCURIOUS GEORGE
BILL CLINTON
THE COMEBACK KID, THE FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT, SLICK WILLIE
RICHARD NIXON
TRICKY DICK, IRON BUTT, THE MAD MONK
GEORGE WASHINGTON
THE OLD FOX, THE FARMER PRESIDENT
JOHN ADAMS
BONNY JOHNNY, YOUR SUPERFLUOUS EXCELLENCY, HIS ROTUNDITY
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
HONEST ABE, THE ILLINOIS APE, THE GREAT EMANCIPATOR
Our nickname paradigm was to present participants with two randomly generated initials—A. D. or T. J. or H. F. or L. I. Participants then generated a nickname for the eventual target of the tease based on those letters, as well as an accompanying story—fact or fiction—that justified the nickname. We encouraged our participants not to worry about profanities or lewdness, notwithstanding their being videotaped; we said we weren’t going to post their videotapes on the Internet or send them to their grandmothers.
To examine how teasing functions as a status contest, I enlisted an honors student, Mike Bradley, a bright young member of a fraternity at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The fraternity housed seventy-five members, tightly packed into a grand old mansion on Lake Mendota. With Mike’s help, we brought groups of four fraternity members—two high-status “actives,” who were established members of the group, and two new, low-status pledges—to the laboratory to tease one another with our newly minted nickname paradigm. They came in October, just as the group was forming its new identity amid the falling leaves and darkening trees in the upper Great Lakes fall. Fraternity members are notorious for their teasing. When told that they were participating in a study of teasing, the high-status actives licked their chops, and the low-status pledges dropped their gaze and shook their heads with a knowing smile, sensing what was coming.
The teasing flowed out of the mouths of the fraternity brothers in bursts of profane, cartoonish poetry, resembling the ritualized insults observed across history and culture. The great satirist Rabelais described nicknames used in a quarrel between cake bakers and shepherds, who playfully violated Grice’s maxims through use of exaggeration (“shit-a-beds”), repetitive alliteration (“crazy carrot-heads,” “mincing milksops”), and oblique metaphor (“poor fish”):
babblers, snaggle-teeth, crazy carrot heads, scabs, shit-a-beds, boors, sly cheats, lazy louts, fancy fellows, drunkards, braggarts, good-for-nothings, dunderheads, nut-shellers, beggars, sneak-thieves, mincing milksops, apers of their betters, idlers, half-wits, gapers, hovel-dwellers, poor fish, cacklers, conceited monkeys, teeth-clatterers, dung-drovers, shitten shepherds.
Our participants resorted to their own earthy patois, generating nicknames like “turkey jerk,” “little impotent,” “human fly,” “anal duck,” “heffer fetcher,” and “another drunk.” Systematically contained in the teasing were admonitions about transgressions that could unsettle the fraternity. There were numerous references to excessive drinking, and roughly a quarter of the teases made reference, often a bit incongruous in the context of the story being told, to the target’s genitalia. One story directed at a low-status pledge called him “Taco John” and revealed to the audience how this pledge had gotten so wasted on eighteen shots of Bacardi that at a late-night feast at the fast-food spot, Taco John’s, he disappeared, and was found passed out in the bathroom, near a toilet, holding his genitals. The fraternity members were notifying each other about moral boundaries: Don’t get too drunk, and keep your genitals to yourself.