Yags: the story thus far

[Kevin Tuite]

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Dear colleagues,
A hearty thanks to all who responded to my query about English nicknames in
-s. I received nearly a dozen messages, some within hours of the initial
posting of the question. One delightful and unforeseen side-effect of this
process, incidently, was the opportunity it presented several colleagues
and friends to send me messages simply to re-establish contact, even if
they had nothing to say about "Yags" and his ilk. Here is a brief summary
of the answers received as of Saturday noon:

1. Many respondants supplied additional examples, even if they had no
notion about the origins of the -s suffix. Marc Picard "was reminded of a
Boston defenceman in the late forties and early fifties by the name of
Clare Raglan whose nom-de-hockey was Rags", and football player John "Pags"
Pagliaro. (All of these names is -ags stirred up long-dormant association
networks & revived the nickname of a schoolmate from across the street I
used to play hockey with, John Haggerty, that we used to call "Haggs").
Elena Bashir and Bettelou Los added examples from "British Public School
culture of earlier days", some of which have the endings -ers (-er-s?)
added to a truncated form of the name, e.g. 'Johnners' and 'Aggers' (BBC
cricket commentators Brian Johnston and Jonathan Agnew), 'Tollers' (J.R.R
Tolkien). Also from Britain is a type of "-a/e+s/z name slang especially
prevalent in the '80s", by which Charles becomes "Chas" and Nigel is "Nezz"
(mentioned by Jasmin Harvey). In Australia, at least, place-names also
undergo truncation with -s suffixation: Tuggeranong (a Canberra suburb) >
"Tuggers", Waramanga > "Warras". These were supplied by Claire Bowern, who
surmised that "it may have something to do with the number of two word
placenames where the first word ends in -s, eg Charter(')s Towers, which
would be "naturally" abbreviated to "Charters". It may have spread from
there to other things".
Getting back to anthroponyms, Elena Bashir noted the occasional alternation
between variants in -s and -sy (or -s-y?), such as "Bugs(y)" and
"Toots(ie)". The OED, according to Jim Rader, deems the shorter variant "a
truncation of the hypocoristic suffix <-sy>, which itself  is not of very
clear origin". Jim himself does not find this explanation "entirely
satisfactory". "My own speculation", he continues, "has been that the <-s>
is a  generalization of plural <-s> in metonymic names such as "boots" (boy
who cleaned boots) and "Goldilocks."

2. As it turns out, just such an explanation has appeared in print, in a
gem of a paper by Peter Mühlhäusler entitled "Stinkiepoos, cuddles, and
related matters" [Australian Journal of Linguistics 3:75-91 (1983)]. Both
Paul Hopper and David Nash called my attention to it. As the title would
lead one to suspect, this is not advised reading for people on restricted
cuteness-intake diets. The nursery- and potty-talk was bad enough, but I
confess it was the extensive quotes from Valentine's messages found in the
personals sections of British newspapers that nearly sent me over the edge
(sample: "To Debbie Pookie Popple Pips from Petey Popsy Pooples"). Great
data, though. Mühlhäusler's primary objective in this paper is to raise
important methodological issues, in the spirit of, among other things,
Michael Silverstein's longstanding campaign against decontextualized and
reference-based models of language and language use. His arguments are far
too complex and far-reaching to be summarizable here in anything but
bowdlerized form -- I strongly commend it to those readers who have made it
this far. I will note only that he postulates the link between "nursery -s"
and the plural, via pars-pro-toto formations of the "Goldilocks" type,
without detailed argument, save a sketchy scenario implicating semantic
inversions in child language (very many = very few).

3. Finally, I wish to express my particular gratitude to Mark Southern, who
sent me no less than an entire chapter from his forthcoming book
"Contagious Couplings: A study of Yiddish expressive shm- and
contact-driven transmission". The chapter is entitled "West Germanic
expressive morpheme-final /-s/ ", and contains an abundance of examples of
what he calls  'hedonyms' ("playful, pleasurably expressive forms") in -s
from German (and several of its dialects), English and Dutch. There is
simply too much in Mark's chapter, in terms of raw data, as well as
geolinguistic and historical analysis, for me to even attempt a summary.
Interested readers should  contact him directly, or wait for the book to
appear. The word 'hedonym' alone is worth the purchase price.

4. With all of this data to wade through & ponder, I'm a long way from even
a foggy idea of what sort of historical process could have resulted in such
playful creations as "Yags", "Tuggers", "Petey Popsy Pooples", and their
West-Germanic kin. The scenario offered by Mühlhäusler seems a good
starting-off point, but I have a hunch it isn't the whole story.

Thanks again to all who responded
Kevin





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Kevin Tuite                         514-343-6514      (bureau)
Département d'anthropologie         514-343-2494 (télécopieur)
Université de Montréal
C.P. 6128, succursale centre-ville
Montréal, Québec H3C 3J7               tuitekj at anthro.umontreal.ca
Notre site Web:            http://www.fas.umontreal.ca/ANTHRO/
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