Nicknames

[Geoff Bannister]

No: HPFGUIDX 185607

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Carol" <justcarol67 at ...> wrote:

Carol:
 > I though you were calling it an established "fact" at the time of the
> Hogwarts Express incident. As I see it, Sirius invented it at the
> first moment he encountered Severus and continued to use it to refer
> to "Snape" in conversation with James and the other Marauders, and at
> least once in public in SWM. Liking his "clever" invention, he
> retained it into adulthood and continued to use it when he addressed
> the adult Snape in OoP. (I can't recall whether he also used it in
> PoA.) Are we agreed on that much, at least? 
 
> IMO, it was not a universally used nickname (certainly the Slytherins
> didn't use it and Severus didn't answer to it. He had his own
> self-applied nickname, the Half-Blood Prince). 

Geoff:
Rhetorical question: "Does a nickname have to be universally applied?" 
My answer is "No".

Allow me to quote from personal experience. I grew up in the North of 
England, moving to London when I was nine and sporting a strong 
Lancashire accent.

At my grammar school, one or two pupils were unable to distinguish 
between a Northern accent and a Scottish one with the result that they 
started to call me "Scot", which was taken up by a few others - one 
friend continued to call me by this name into my late teens.

In 1954, my namesake Roger Bannister became the first guy to run a 
four minute mile so, to sports-minded acquaintances, I became "Roger". 
About the same time, the famous "Goon Show" radio programme had a 
character called "Minnie Bannister" so i also collected the nickname, 
usually abbreviated to "Min".

All these nicknames hung around throughout my schooldays with different 
groups of people using them - there was very little overlap and none of 
them were universally used. Does that mean that they were not nicknames? 
Not in my experience. 

So, I would suggest that "Snivellus" and "HBP" and any other unrevealed 
names were indeed nicknames. QED.