DISQUS

Better Communication Results: Tagged again, like I was last summer

  • Donna Tocci · 3 years ago
    The Princess Bride! I hadn't thought about that in years. It's a great flick! Classic.
  • Heidi Miller · 3 years ago
    Donna--

    Not in years? Egads! I think about it nearly every day! What's not to love--poufy shirts, pirates, bad puns, "wart-faced buffoons," sword play, torture, and of course, witty banter!
  • Heidi Miller · 3 years ago
    And by the way, Lee, isn't it time I get a cute nickname, huh? Granted, my name isn't as melodic as "Pepsi-Cola," but if the Aussies can come up with rhyming slang for "stairs"...
  • Dan Hill · 3 years ago
    An affection towards The Princess Bride appears to be a prerequisite before you're allowed to have a blog.
  • Lee Hopkins · 3 years ago
    Dan, showing a preference for 'The Princess Bride' reflects your fine breeding and exquisite aesthetic tastes. That is why your humble correspondents above all remember the movie with such affection/affliction.

    Now, to the serious issue at hand: a new name for The Divine Miss M. 'Tis true that there is a rhyming slang for 'stairs', but it was the 'to and froms' (aka 'Poms' [aka 'British']) that concocted that one. As for 'Miller'...

    My trusty rhyming dictionary (handy tool for every wannabe songwriter and 5th grade poet) delivers me such gems as killer, pillar, squilla (a shrimp - hardly appropriate), Scylla (a Greek sea nymph - perhaps more appropriate), schiller, shiller (someone who touts their wares at market stalls -- again, perhaps appropriate [grin]), tiller and villa.

    There is also sabadilla (a tropical plant), granadilla (a passion flower, not a molester of grandmothers), sapodilla (a tropical evergreen tree), drosophila (fruit fly, something we are very conscious of here in South Australia, because every other State has it and we don't and we bloody well don't want it, either!), gypsophila (a meditteranean plant and lovely it is too, but thin, weak and insubstantial -- hardly my picture of The Divine Miss M), disimilar and verisimilar (which means 'likely to be true').

    And I haven't even touched on matters such as sarsaparilla, papilla, caterpillar, axilla (an armpit), manzanilla (a very dry sherry) or distiller...

    But I ask you, what is wrong with 'The Divine Miss M'? After all, Donna P only got her name from me because of a post she once made about how telesales people can never get her name right, and PepsiCola just sprang to my lips (which was a far better choice than another word-pair that also sprang up - ahem!)

    However, if none of the above appeal, I could always open it up to the greater public at large by posting about it? We could also run it on FIR... Let me know, but I reserve the egomaniacle right to post about it first
    :-)
  • Eric Eggertson · 3 years ago
    There's a certain organic quality about good nicknames that is hard to replicate when you sit down and build one from scratch.

    They have to be simultaneously complimentary and just a little bit cruel. They have to originate from the person's name or station in life, but they should amplify something about the person that resonates with others.

    And they should be memorable.

    I had an elementary school teacher we called Little Hitler. She loved the name, partly because students who hadn't dealt with her in the past tended to tread lightly for the first hour or two, just because of the name. And for a substitute teacher, a couple of hours of terrified silence can make a huge difference in getting through the day.