In the light of the upcoming 90th birthday anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II, which will be marked on 21st April, the world was enlightened by the news of how the little Prince George calls his granny.
While the rest of the world would formally call Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, “Your Majesty,” the two-and-a-half-year-old Prince George has a cure nickname for her, he calls her ‘Gan-Gan.’
Now, we will step aside from the Royal protocol and thoughts whether ‘Gan-Gan’ is a repetitive diminutive of ‘Granny’ and instead safely explore the word “nickname”.
The word nickname was not a part of the English vocabulary until the 15th century, as until then, the term eke name was commonly used.
The word eke entered the English language circa 9th century, from the Old Germanic root aukon and the meaning of ‘an addition, a supplement’.
And from there the phrase eke name originated, with the meaning of an ‘additional name’, and which was firstly recorded in print in 1303, in Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne.
By the fifteenth century, the misdivision of the syllables of the phrase “an ekename” led to its reanalysis as “a nekename”.
The acknowledgement of both spellings was firstly attested in the Promptorium parvulorum (Latin: “Storehouse for children”) – the first English-to-Latin dictionary which was completed around year 1440.
The following two centuries saw numerous changes in the spelling (nyckename, nyck name, necname, nicke-name…), however the pronunciation and meaning of the word remained relatively stable.
The first written record to contain the modern spelling of the term comes from Robert Godfrey’s Various injuries and abuses in chemical and galenical physique committed both by Physicians and Apothecaries, detected in 1674: “Yee Independents, or yee Anabaptists, or yee Quakers, (which are all but Nick names).”
And the first record to use the term in its sense of not only an alternative name, but a quite humours, even humiliating one, comes from 1710, The Tatler by Isaac Bickerstaff : “He unfortunately got the Nickname of the Squeaking Doctor. “
Let us return to Her Majesty and mention that though her official nickname is, of course, “Lilibet”; the Duke of Edinburgh reportedly calls her affectionately “Cabbage.”
