Mr. Gooddirt is incredibly good at nicknames. He comes up with them on the fly, and they’re always accurate and evocative and appropriate to the situation. There’s no profession for this, I don’t think, otherwise we’d be living large.
He comes up with the best ones when he’s half-awake.
A few examples:
The other night I went to the bathroom and bumped into the laundry rack on the way back. It made a metallic rattling noise, and I, an angry whimper. From the bed:
“What’s happening over there, Jinglebanger?”
Or:
When Sprocket is feeling happy, he trots just ahead of Jim and me and looks backwards, over his shoulder, at us, while he’s walking. The combination of movement and situation makes for a funny walk.
Mr. Gooddirt: “Well, hello there, Wobbles.”
Or
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night feeling very displaced. The automatic reaction is to reach for my phone or my ipad and find out what time it is. I duck over the side of the bed and turn it on so the LCD doesn’t disturb the light-sleeping Mr. Gooddirt. This is usually a totally failure, because he snorts awake and says something like:
“Whatcha doing, Glow worm?”
I cannot figure out how he does this. It seems to be some kind of formula:
Noise or action
+
Creature
——————–
Nickname
Try as I might, I can’t reproduce his results. Gah.
NB: This is on my mind lately because my next work, I think, is a resurrection of the MG novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo a while back. There are talking animals. I would like some of them to be well named.
These are the things which addle my brain.
