Smelly Tom Is Innocent

I come from a long line of nicknamers.

Not casual ones. Industrial-grade nicknamers. People who treat names the way other families treat leftovers: endlessly repurposed, occasionally unrecognisable, and somehow still in circulation decades later.

Nicknames don’t need to be shorter, accurate, or fair. They just need to stick. One incident, one misheard phrase, one moment of linguistic chaos and that’s you, forever.

Take the plumber. Smelly Tom.

Tom is not smelly. Tom has never been smelly, except for one afternoon during a heatwave when he arrived at the house having done physical labour in temperatures that made the rest of us lie very still and hope for death. He committed one olfactory offence under mitigating meteorological circumstances and has been serving a life sentence ever since.

He could turn up scented like a botanical garden for the next thirty years and it wouldn’t matter. Evidence is irrelevant. Nicknames are not a justice system; they’re folklore.

Short names are particularly vulnerable. Will became Willis, then Phyllis, for reasons nobody can defend. Tracey became Tracey Love, which must be said in a Yorkshire accent despite the fact that none of us watch Coronation Street. Osmosis is powerful.

Dogs are not exempt. The spaniel looked remarkably like a piglet as a puppy and became Pig, despite already possessing a perfectly serviceable name. Pig became Piggy, then Piggy Woo, which expanded into Piggy Wiggy Woo. From there came Woozle and, with an inexplicable increase in social standing, Mrs Woo. She is still occasionally Pig. Her actual name barely gets a look in.

Sometimes we don't actually know the person's name. The man who mends the mower is simply Mower Man. This would have been perfectly adequate, except that Mower Man fits rather too comfortably into Mirror Man by the Human League, so his name now has to be sung to the tune. I doubt he knows this.

Appearance works too. Curly Sue had hair that embraced humidity, so Curly Sue she became. Big Face had, well, a big face.

Practicality plays a role. Put two people with the same name and something has to be done. We once had two Richards. They became Big Dick and Little Dick. Problem solved, if not elegantly.

Sometimes the naming process is more… interactive. I once stood outside the bathroom trying to establish which of my three sons was in there.

“Who is in the bathroom?”

“Me.”

“Which me?”

“Big me.”

“Which big me?”

“Bigger me.”

And that is how Bigamy entered the family vocabulary.

Spoonerisms are dangerous. Matt Cook became Cat Muck, and once you’ve accidentally improved a man’s name that comprehensively, there’s no incentive to put it back.

Names can outlive their original owners. Dan had an Aunty Marjorie who became Aunty Margarine because Margarine was funnier. The original Aunty Margarine is long dead, but the name survived her. Someone sufficiently reminiscent inherited it and is now Aunty Margarine in her own right. The title will pass on like an hereditary peerage.We also had a neighbour called Marjorie who became Barjorie on account of her size,  and eventually Onion Barjorie. No one has the faintest idea where the onion came from.

Dan is particularly useful because his memory for names is appalling. When he can’t remember someone’s name, his brain doesn’t give him a blank. It preserves whatever information it considers important and improvises the rest. Camilla had already acquired the nickname Camilla the Killer. This did not stick with Dan. What stuck was the general atmosphere of violent crime, and Murder Ange she became. By that point, correcting him felt wasteful.

Then there is Clockweights. His origin story is short: he once crawled under a table wearing a short dressing gown, with his testicles dangling beneath it like a pair of clockweights. Some names write themselves. That one etched itself into the collective psyche.

Cowshit Carol was originally Offroad Carol because she had an off-road mobility scooter. Then she had an accident and fell into the midden. Offroad Carol died instantly. Cowshit Carol rose from the slurry like a phoenix made of manure.

Then there is simple linguistic opportunity. If someone is being a twat and their name contains space for twat, knob or arse, we will explore the possibilities. Short swearwords are particularly satisfying because they can sometimes be slipped directly into the original. Thomas became Tomarse. Once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it.

Swearing can become part of a name by other means. Fucking Phil and Fucking Michelle earned theirs through the sheer quantity of their own swearing. The fucking is less an insult than an honorific.

Shitting Sharon, on the other hand, acquired hers through several separate incidents involving turds. Unlike Smelly Tom, Sharon has provided a substantial body of supporting evidence.

None of this is formally agreed. Nobody announces acceptance. Someone says it, someone else repeats it, and at some unknowable moment it stops being a joke and becomes the name. Origins fade. Clockweights will not, but others do.

And somewhere, entirely unaware that clemency was ever an option, Smelly Tom continues to serve his sentence.