I saw several people discussing nicknames on Twitter this morning and it instantly made me think about a nickname someone gave me many years ago. It wasn’t a flattering nickname, but I have to admit that it was kind of funny—in a hurtful sort of way. The nickname was “Slow-Mo.” I got the tag because a guy I was playing basketball with said it looked like I was in slow motion on the court.
He might have just been talking about my style of play which relied on fakes and a couple of unorthodox moves; a guy who is 5’10” and overweight has to depend on some sort of deception on the court, otherwise he’ll never get a decent look at the basket. But I suspect it had more to do with my being overweight than my movement.
The nickname never really caught on, thankfully. A couple of guys used it on the basketball court, but it stopped there.
The thing about a hurtful nickname is, it’s a constant reminder about some quality or lack thereof that a person doesn’t need to be reminded of. The person already knows his or her deficiencies and in one way or another is trying to compensate for them, or maybe even just forget about them for 60 minutes during a game.
But we have something inside us as humans that like to point out the deficiencies in others. Maybe we’re just trying to hide our own issues.
