"Chick" = nickname for "Charles"

[Jonathan Lighter]

A number of these "Chicks" are non-Charlies, leading me to suspect some kind of confluence. There was also durable Hollywood supporting player Chick (ne' "Fehmer") Chandler (1905-88).

  My grandfather told me of the Chick/ Charlie equivalence in the 1950s, in (significantly?) a baseball context.

  JL

Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Wilson Gray
Subject: Re: "Chick" = nickname for "Charles"
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Murat Bernard "Chic"[sic] Young was the originator of the comic strip, Blondie.

-Wilson

On 9/19/06, Paul Johnston
wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Paul Johnston

> Subject: Re: "Chick" = nickname for "Charles"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I thought of old time baseball players like Chick Gandil of the
> "Black Sox" and contemporary Chick Fewster of the 1920 Dodgers.
> Alas, neither was a Charles. I think, however, the Scottish comedian
> Chic(k) Murray was, though, and there's a Glaswegian lower-division
> footballer (soccer player) named Chic Connolly who is also known as
> Charlie, so it's still alive over there--and you never hear Chuck there.
>
> Paul Johnston
> On Sep 18, 2006, at 8:14 PM, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> > -----------------------
> > Sender: American Dialect Society
> > Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
> > Subject: Re: "Chick" = nickname for "Charles"
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > ---------
> >
> > On Sep 18, 2006, at 4:49 PM, Jon Lighter wrote:
> >
> >> An "early" printed ex. of this (obs.?) U.S. alternative to "Chuck":
> >
> > not entirely obsolete. Yale professor Charles Perrow, the author of
> > the wonderful Normal Accidents, was known as Chick when he was an
> > undergraduate at Black Rock College, and is sometimes so called
> > today. the story, as i recall it, was that when he arrived at Black
> > Rock, there was already a Charles, a Charlie, and a Chuck, and it was
> > a small place, so he had to be something else, hence Chick.
> >
> > arnold
> >
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--
-Wilson
----
Everybody says, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange
complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.

--Sam Clemens

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