Big Nate Two-Times, Two-Times

I suspect that the kids who had Lincoln Peirce as an art teacher or coach in high school had a pretty good time. He seems to have a good sense of their lives.

Big Nate is immensely popular with middle-school kids, and I suspect it's because Peirce remembers what it was like, but, rather than totally immersing the characters in their life-stages as Richard Thompson does in Cul de Sac, he gives Nate a bit of narrative perspective -- not as worldly-wise as Charlie Brown, certainly, but not as trapped-in-his-own-perspective as Petey Otterloop, either.

And less self-conscious than Huck Finn. And more contemporaneous than Scout, who is ostensibly narrating "To Kill a Mockingbird" in retrospect, though she does so in a way that recaptures her experience as child.

What I really think kids like about Big Nate is that, while he is the character you identify with, he also goes back and forth between being very cool (as in today's strip) and being a complete screw-up.

In general, that's not unusual, and you can name a million characters, from Rob Petrie to Liz Lemon, who allow us to identify with them in one story as they fight the stupidity, and then to cringe at them in another as they become the stupidity.

But it's not that common for kid-characters, and not only is Nate popular with middle-schoolers but the strip also provides a fun read for adults -- and that kind of dual appeal is not all that common, either.

As for nicknames, the topic opens a whole locker full of memories. The idea of a person standing there solemnly doling out a name is comic exaggeration, but there were certainly people who could create a nickname that would stick and people who couldn't, just as there were nickname-rich social circles and circles where, if the people in them had nicknames, nobody outside the circle knew about them.

Some nicknames are innocuous. Like everyone else in the world named "Peterson," I became "Pete" in high school, and carried the name to college because, at an Irish-Catholic school, you'd get whiplash if you looked around every time someone yelled, "Hey, Mike!" But it wasn't a particularly remarkable nickname, any more than that of my friend "Brownie," whose last name was, yes, "Brown."

But when a very young Wayne watched an older, much larger boy land a huge trout and then grabbed it and tried to run home with it, he acquired the name "Trout," which he carried at least through high school.

And when Alfred let a grounder go under his glove in practice, he was reamed out by the baseball coach for trying to protect his little pinkies. He's still "Pinky" to the folks back home.

And they don't all start early: Some friends were working construction on the lakeside the summer before senior year and taking a much-needed break when they saw Steve go by in a motorboat with a couple of cute girls in bathing suits. Someone's exhausted observation, "Look at that Big Dog!" provided a name quickly shortened to "Biggie" that is still his, even to the people in his parents' generation.

Note that none of these names are particularly complimentary, and that wasn't just our circle. Even in the NBA, young men whose mothers had carefully chosen perfectly respectable names for them carried their childhood handles into the big league, names like "Foots Walker" and "Sleepy Floyd."

All of which adds to the righteousness of today's Big Nate, because a kid really was much less likely to get the nickname "Zip" for his wonderous speed than for a tendency to walk around with his fly open.

 

Comments

[Mary]

"Big Dog" - that's how Steve got that name? I never knew. Don't know who "Pinky" is; have an idea about "Trout."

For a while in Jr. High I was "Bucky", for obvious reasons, and then "Silver Mouth" when I wore braces. I think it was "Digger" who was responsible for both those names. He was the "Big Nate" of nicknames in our crowd.

The nickname I hated most came from my own family. When I started school I announced that I would henceforth be called by my given name and no other. Even at that early age I KNEW I didn't want to go through life with the nickname they had saddled me with.

I only allowed one person to use the hated name because I didn't have much choice: he'd been my first playmate, there at the beginning when the name stuck. Fortunately for me, Bill was a nice guy and used this knowledge sparingly and mostly not in public.

[Mike Peterson]

Well, they were all from Cranberry, if that helps.

And you don't have to have grown up with us to know what "Digger's" father did for a living. That's a relatively universal one, though it was a little disconcerting when he inherited the family business and the nickname remained very much in use. He's probably buried people by now who never knew his real name.

[tudza]

Three people before me were called Mike, so when I was asked whether I preferred Mike or Michael I said, "Call me John." So, I was John-Mike for two years of high school.

[Sherwood Harrington]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sherwoodh/4016185686/