I was speaking about random nothings with a friend not long ago when the topic of nicknames came up. It seemed that we both knew a few people who had them, and we pondered for a bit about exactly why, and what those names might represent. But just as the topic was about to move on to something else, I was overcome by a sudden gust of rascality.

"Well, we'll have to think of a nickname for you," I proposed.

"No. No way," said my friend, whose name is Suzy. "Besides, I already have a nickname."

"You do? What is it?"

"Suzy."

What followed was a heated discussion of what exactly constitutes a solid, credible nickname, and what forces must come together to create one. I maintained that Suzy was not a nickname at all (at least for her) but a diminutive of Susan…and it was her chosen professional name, no less. She refused to accept this definition, but did offer a counter-proposal.

"Okay, what about Tricia? That's what my parents almost named me."

"Tricia? For a nickname?"

I considered it, but it seemed all wrong, though I couldn't explain why.

"No, I'm sorry. That doesn't work." Then it came to me. "But you know what does work?"

"What?"

"Trixie."

"Oh, no. No way."

But it was too late. A nickname had been born.

* * *

What makes a good nickname? I considered the question for the next few days, thinking about names and identity, probing my own experience. I'd had various nicknames as a child and teenager, quite a lot in fact. How had they come about? What was their guiding force? I recalled disliking those old nicknames, chaffing at them like a horse trying to get free of a harness. But enough time has passed now during which I've simply been "Darren" for those unpleasant memories to lose their subjectivity. Nicknaming, I reasoned, must have a governing logic, a secret logarithm or pattern. For the sake of academic investigation, could I now bring a neutral eye to my own experiences and so define the true nature of a nickname? Confidently, I took on the task.

Perhaps the first rule of nicknaming, I decided upon reflection, is the axiom that the person being nicknamed has little choice in the matter. This might sound odd in today's world of shameless image manipulation, where children mimic pop stars and celebrities in redefining themselves at will, where what one appears to be is more important than what one is. Music stars in particular have a singular authority in nicknaming themselves. There's "Bono" and "The Edge" of the rock band U2, who surely were christened something less, well, edgy. There's Michael Jackson's campaign as "The King of Pop"…which is how he ordered MTV to refer to him, lest they sacrifice the privilege of airing his latest irrelevant effort. And finally, rap artists seem to have a hidden commandment that prohibits the use of their real names; were Puff Daddy, Eminem, Dr. Dre, Snoop Doggy Dog, Biggie Smalls, and L. L. Cool J to go by their real names (that is, Sean, Marshall, Andre, Calvin, Antonio, and James), they might be mistaken for the latest Orlando boy band. Outside the arc of pop media and marketing, however, the old rule of nicknaming still applies. In real life, one cannot simply decide to be called by a certain nickname, and even an all-out media blitz won't really help.

Specific examples from my own life will help illuminate this point. In my high school days, I very much wanted to be known simply as "Cro" by my fellows. This was what many of my father's friends called him, and I liked the manly abruptness of its sound, which seemed much more tough, declarative, and memorable than "Darren." But not a single person ever called me by this nickname, even when prompted (I remember one friend who did offer up the permutation "Crovy" every now and then, but that didn't catch on at all either).

To my credit I was not to be dissuaded, and during my senior year in high school I made a dedicated push again for Cro, when I ran for Class Treasurer during school elections. My election motto was the very minimalist "Vote Cro" (I knew enough about the psychology of advertising to hope that the assonance would stick in the minds of my audience), and I plastered the walls of the school with hundreds of flyers that read exactly that. This was adolescent propaganda at its finest, as I could conceive it: carpet-bombing my way to acceptance, depending that sheer ubiquity and forced familiarity would drive home my new identity, not to mention political success. I climbed a ladder to paste up my motto in huge six-foot-high letters on the cafeteria wall, a bold move: my nickname would seep into the subconscious as the school population ate its institutional pizza and drank its chocolate milk, and I congratulated myself on taking the massive, focused steps needed to achieve my goals.

"Vote Cro" was a miserable failure, of course, on both fronts. The duties of Class Treasurer, whatever they might have been, went to a popular football player, and the same percentage of people called me Cro after the election as before; that is, zero. I later discovered that my brother and a posse of his friends (all juniors) had been running terrorist interference all the while, tearing down my leaflets and posters as fast as I could get them up. But I knew my failures here were significant of something larger than simple schoolboy sabotage. When my parents later bought me a Varsity letter jacket that already had my given name embroidered on the breast as a surprise, I was barely disappointed. I'd wanted a scripted "Cro," of course…but by then the idea seemed entirely ludicrous. I could tattoo that nickname on my forehead, and people would still forever call me something--anything--else. I was coming to understand intimately the first rule of nicknaming.

Another example, this one from pop culture, illustrates the principle that you can't choose your own nickname. In a memorable episode of Seinfeld, perpetual schmuck George Costanza decides that he should have a nickname, and that this nickname should be "T-Bone." Unlike me, however, George is crafty enough to understand that an obvious frontal campaign won't work. He must plant the seeds for his idea, and let others "discover" the appropriateness of the new label, and so be nicknamed by others. George's plan actually pays off in a sense--he announces loudly in the office that he's hankering for a T-bone steak for lunch, generating plenty of attention…but the nickname goes instead to a colleague who, following his lead, orders the same thing. Livid, George later confronts the new "T-Bone," arguing that his rightful nickname has been unfairly usurped, gesticulating wildly in typical Costanza fashion. Of course, the rest of the office sees this ape-like display through a nearby window, and George finally earns himself his a new name: "Koko the Monkey."

Every other nickname rule descends from this first principle. For if we have the liberty to label ourselves, then we can also choose to ignore any other naming rules, and nicknames essentially become meaningless, revealing nothing but our own egoistic illusions. We'd be a world of heroes and champions and genuises--Supermans, Big John Studds, Einsteins, and T-Bones--and how boring would that be? Hollywood would have us believe that jet fighter squadrons are packed with Mavericks, Icemen, and Jesters, square-jawed heroes whose call-signs accurately embody their demi-godly qualities. But a friend of mine who flies F-15s tells me differently, that a squadron usually waits until some screw-up, mishap, or other embarrassment befalls a fellow flyer before he's saddled with a nickname; barring that, they'll go with any kind of humbling label they can come up with. In his crew, there's a "Boom-Boom," so named after a particularly hard landing blew out a couple of tires; a "Leash," whose wife is the overbearing, controlling sort; and a Lt. Lee, who simply became known as "Ug."

The troubles that George Costanza and I encountered are also directly related to the second rule: nicknames must be organic, and they must be spontaneous. George understands the importance of spontaneity, and how to manufacture this atmosphere. But he's oblivious to organic necessity. A nickname must arise naturally from one's persona, an outgrowth of character or personality. Nicknames that fail in this regard will shrivel like failed plant grafts, while organic nicknames are constantly refreshed and ratified by the wellspring of one's own individual nature. This is what George fails to understand. By simple connotation, T-Bones must be large, hearty, uncomplicated men, with a rocky core of strength and determination. George is obviously not a T-Bone…and just as important, he never will be, even if he had steak for lunch for the rest of his life.

On a subtler level, I had the same problem with Cro. The nickname should arise spontaneously as an abbreviation of my last name…shouldn't it? But what's the organic unity here? What qualities does a nickname like Cro connotate? Dark Solidity? Piercing Directness? Shrouded Mystery? Scavenging Doom? I'm afraid that I embodied none of these characteristics in high school, and so tagging me with such a nickname would have been like pinning wings on a donkey. That may seem a bit harsh, but young people understand these ideas on an instinctual level. As a freshman, I knew a rather gawky but likeable senior named Todd Johnson, a fellow soccer team member and one of the few upperclassmen who deigned to acknowledge any underclassmen. One day I asked another senior on the team why it was that no one ever called Todd by the nickname "T.J." This earned me a skeptical look and a purist response: "Todd's not cool enough to be a 'T.J.'"

That said, it's important to point out a sub-set of nicknames that would seem to contradict the rule of organic necessity. These anomalies evolve from the theory of Humor Through Incongruity, and they turn relevance on its head. For instance, we might give the nickname "Animal" to a particularly mild-mannered and studious classmate, for the sheer contradictory joy of it. This is the sort of insight that I was going for earlier with my friend Suzy. A nickname like "Trixie" calls to mind (at least to me) saucy tarts, wild party girls, and perhaps even more lubricious imaginings, all things my level-headed and rather proper friend isn't in the least (or at least, as far as I know).

All of which leads us into the next rule of nicknames, one fundamentally connected to the others: more often than not, nicknames that work do so by intensifying, illuminating, and broadcasting something perceived as "negative." I put that word in quotations to suggest its subjective nature, extending to anything that challenges our self-perception and the lordship of our ego. If we all had our druthers concerning nicknames, we'd select only such appellations that highlight and emphasize our best qualities, and ideally suggest our Renaissance-like multitude of abilities. Any name that embodies less would be "negative" in the sense that it cruelly categorizes and classifies, blatantly boxes us into pigeon-holes, and unfairly distills the universe of our varied and wondrous talents into a single inadequate epithet. When your individual complexity, all that you are and think and believe, is boiled down to a base element and then squeezed into a singularly inadequate label like "Skippy" or "Goober," the sense of self howls at the vast indignity of it all.

Obviously many strident childhood nicknames follow this rule of negativity on the most superficial of levels. "Fatso," for example, has been entrenched in the lexicon so deeply that it's hard to believe it's still employed with any effect. Nicknames that focus on appearance--"Carrot-Top," "Freckles," "Shorty"--are common sources of trauma and adolescent angst, but their apparent cruelty can possibly be mitigated by common suffering or the onset of puberty. They're names that millions of kids have had to deal with, so we can at least imagine that a chorus of sympathetic souls commiserates. At any rate, society has developed a whole range of protective responses to such nicknames, chanted like mantras to ward off this evil. There's the Mobius circular madness of "I know you are, but what am I?" and the vaguely pagan "Sticks and Stones" rhyme. As children are civilized from little monsters into humans, however, the purely descriptive nicknames eventually fade, replaced by more esoteric and strangely persistent labels.

The most stubborn of nicknames seem to be those that are tossed off in a casual aside…but whose rightness taps into some kind of underlying organic unity. This may arise from some idiosyncracy in name, behavior, or personality, but once known, it feeds on its host like a parasite. While I was going through the throes of "not-Cro" in high school, I was subject to this very phenomenon. One of the more outspoken clowns in my 11th grade English class abruptly called me Derwood one day…and the floodgates opened. Of course, my name had been stretched and distorted before--I'd gotten Delrod, Derwin, and a host of similar offerings through the years--but Derwood was something special. It came, of course, from the TV show Bewitched (which even in that day was a faded re-run), the name Endora preferred to call her son-in-law, rather than the perfectly fine "Darrin."

In just a few days, the virus of Derwood spread throughout the class, and then the entire school. Coaches, teachers, and students I didn't even know addressed me as such. Even freshmen--freshmen!!--had the gall to address me this way. The nickname took on a life of its own, became far bigger than I was. The males in my own family soon began calling me Derwood, and to this day, the title is sometimes resurrected in casual conversation by my father or brother.

Let's run Derwood through the nickname rules to figure out its resilient appeal. First, I certainly didn't choose it. I mean, come on--who would? Second, was it spontaneous? Well, certainly. In fact, it completely blindsided me, and any resistance I managed only fueled its use. Organically inspired? The connection through an iconic sit-com is clear…but let's ask precisely why this nickname latched itself to my personality, in particular. Why did that name fit me more than another? How come nobody ever called me "Bobby" instead, after the singer Bobby Darin, let alone "Cro?"

In retrospect, the answers to these questions seem obvious. "Derwood" is inherently amusing, suggestive of dorkiness ("Der" sounds a lot like "duh," our universal utterance at the time for any obvious stupidity) combined with the lumber-like density of "wood." The name conjures applied nerdiness at best, and hardheaded ignorance at worst. (Since I could at least boast of Honors classes in school, I'd like to think the name reflected impenetrable intelligence rather than dunce-hood.) In a larger capacity, Derwood positioned me in the hierarchy of high school--as a bookworm-type with less than awe-inspiring physical prowess--better than any rational explanation could. Where Cro failed, Derwood reigned. If I wanted to be known and acknowledged in that realm (and what high-schooler save the most liberated non-conformists among us didn't?), it would have to be under these more limited but probably more accurate terms. Derwood was only "negative" as long as I held on to the illusion that I warranted the zaniness of "Spaz," the size and presence of "Big Dog," or the implied respect and style of a shortened surname: "Kaz," "Coop," "Romo"…or "Cro," for that matter.

Thus, the best nicknames adhere to all three rules and transcend their surface "negativity" through a laser accuracy that homes in on something deeper. This is what dooms most childhood labels, which turn out to be simple taunts rather than legitimate nicknames. "Fatso," "Tubby," and "Lard Ass" are weak in that they apply to a wide segment of the population, define a common physical state rather than individuality, and address a condition that is essentially transient: a four-week diet and exercise plan could render flab into fitness, and the "nickname" would thus evaporate.

What's an example of a good nickname? The best fit the individual, sometimes in a very abstract way. For instance, another friend of mine has come to be known as "Scuba Steve" in the last year or so. (I'm told that this is also a character in a recent Adam Sandler movie, though the point is moot here.) Now, Steve isn't an afficianado of scuba diving, or snorkeling, or any other kind of underwater hobby, as far as I know. He's a laid-back forty-something with long hair who teaches college composition and plays guitar in a rock and country outfit. So wherefore Scuba Steve?

To be honest, I don't know. But somehow, the nickname fits…from the first time I heard it, it rang true like a tuning fork. Maybe Steve has a certain underwater quality about him, like he's viewing the world through goggles. One running joke has him diving to the bottom of a Budweiser bottle when it's quitting time. It could be that the languid pace of swimming beneath the waves matches his easy-going, phlegmatic personality. At any rate, it fits. In similar fashion, some people have a suffix-prone personality: if "Scuba Steve" were a little different, he might instead become "Steve-O," "Steverino," or "the Steve-inator." One of my best friends is simply known as "the Ross-Man." Again, there's some magic compatibility here that defies analysis. The best of nicknames achieve a Zen union with their owners.

Other nicknames are a bit more piercing. I once knew a "Random Susan," whose conversation (and apparently, thought processes as well) was littered with non sequiters. I don't think she was aware of the label, and it does seem a bit cynical and cruel, but the name was spot on. And in high school, I at least had the comfort of knowing that "Derwood" wasn't as bad as "Sterile Daryl," which is how one of my less-fortunate classmates was usually addressed. Maybe I should be thankful that no one made the leap to "Barren Darren."

Ultimately, these nickname rules are only guidelines, made to be broken. If there's an underlying truism to remember, a final note of reflection, it's that nicknames by their very nature are "positive"--because they signify that the recipient is nicknamable. A person nicknamed is an individual, differentiated, a cipher no longer and thus special, worthy of the ritual of naming. Even my friend Trixie can take heart in the knowledge that there are worse fates than putting up with an unwanted nickname…namely, not putting up with one at all.