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Thursday, January 12th, 2012, 12:10 a.m.

I was thinking about nicknames today. A result of a conversation I had with my own daughter some time ago. She is pregnant with her first and without a name for the child, and not knowing if it is a girl or a boy, I started or she started referring to it as the bump. So, that is the nickname I have started to use for it. BUMP!

That got me thinking of how people got their nicknames and it took me as far back as my great uncle, an Irishman named Charlie Brown, of all things….try to find the root of that one? He drove tanks in the first war and lived to be over ninety like all of his brothers back in Ireland although, he settled in Montreal. When I was a kid, he nicknamed me “Smilerbun” because I did a lot of smiling back in those days. I probably did that to confuse them because I never had the right answers to questions and I often diversified from the point like I am about to do as an example. At age 70 a fellow who I have kept running into throughout my life, now a retired Dean of History and former radio commentator, once my running coach, earlier a YMCA summer school aids, told me that he remembered me coming to my grade school at one point and asking the kids what the thought would be a good project. I got the words “Bump Bump” or something similar in my head and kept repeating it. I suppose I was expecting him to ask me what I was saying and he did not understand that “Bump Bump” was a game we played against a particular tree in the schoolyard and each boy jump over the line of boys all bent over bracing for the next kid trying to jump on the train until someone could not do it anymore. We kept it up until the whole line collapsed with those on top landing on those on the bottom. No one every really got hurt but it was a lot of fun back then. Anyway, I was “Smilerbun” to my great uncle but this long time friend’s high school grade ten history student as well…then while he was doing his PhD I met him years later at my brother’s place in Kingston and we all had dinner together one night. Finally marrying late in life, I think for a second time, he had a daughter and twins who will know their father as an old man of a grandfather’s age. I saw him at the High School’s 40th anniversary reunion in 2000 and then later on the Internet I found he had moved to Moncton NB in retirement, a long trip from Montreal. We occasionally touched base since then but not for a few years now. Age is catching up to him. If I remember correctly, as a youngster in the last year of the war, he worked at Dorval shuffling people around here and there across the tarmac on an air force truck when it was a busy war airport waiting for the war to end so that always seemed to make him about 12 to 15 years older than me. I am pushing 68 so he must be pushing 80 by now. Fond memories of a name I knew from childhood, yet one I never heard with a nickname. During WWII everyone ended up with a nickname. It seemed to be the only way people became well known. Having researched dozens upon dozens of airmen who fought, lived through or died in the war, I found that they almost all had nicknames. One set of twins referred to themselves as Duke. As kids the other kids called them Dupes after the teacher tried to explain to the kids all about duplicates. The identical twins did not like Dupe so called themselves Duke and it stuck through WWII. Both in the same squadron as flight commanders, their Spitfires said Duke MK1 and Duke MKII to distinguish them apart. The MK part was an airplane manufacturer’s designation in use at the time. In fact, nicknames were so popular during the war, even my own parents had them. Patricia became “Paddy” and John became “Johnnie.” Most were a lot more elaborate than that like “The man from Longmoor,” a place in the UK somewhere. I think you get the gist of war life. Then there were names like, “Tailend Charlie,” “Radio” or “Radar” Some were referred to a “Swede, Pole, or Fighter and Frenchie. The list went on. “Kilroy” was a popular one all over the place, turning up with a nose hanging over a fence crayoned everywhere including on some of the bombs that went to Germany. So, now that I am running out of space I am going to just say that for now, BUMP is the baby’s nickname. Better than “Ba” when my own kids could not say Grandpa. “Waddaya tink?” Goodnight, BUMP!