Talking about words: 'Prexy'
With Professor Richard Bailey
Perhaps nobody ever called James B. Angell "Prexy" to his face,
but he was almost universally known as "the Prexy" during his long
presidency of the University of Michigan.
Prex was first the slangy name
for a college president—there
is documentation back to the 1820s—and then, at Yale, the slangy
name got a diminutive and so prexy was born, and after
that prez emerged and is still, to some extent, around.
(The rappers "Dead Prez" are paying homage to the earlier '90s musical
ensemble, "Dead Presidents.")
Nostalgia is a recurrent theme in cultural
reflections on English. The language was "better" when pairs like disinterested and uninterested were
kept separate. It was a good time when educated people knew the difference
between infer and imply .
Nostalgia of this sort is often a little
silly. In the mid-19th century, an essayist thought it was too
bad that the good old ways were vanishing. Old-time English used
lots of negatives in the same clause, and using lots of negatives—"The
Russians have never had
no right to no kind of passage through the Bosporus"—made things
stronger, more forceful, and definite. Schoolteachers were enervating
the language with persnickety rules!
About the same time, another opinion-maker thought English had been
destroyed by the Norman Conquerors who flooded a perfectly good Germanic
language with a potpourri of words from a far inferior language.
(That is, French.)
So it would be a mistake to get too nostalgic over the fact that
around the University of Michigan, nicknames are not what they were.
Of course we have "Bo" Schembechler and "Red" Berenson and even "Lundo" (for
the legendary Michigan athlete, Don Lund). But these familiar tags
seem not nearly so vivid as Fielding H. "Hurry-Up" Yost.
In May 1961, J. F. Lawton '11, a songwriter and insurance agent,
was celebrated by the Regents for having written the book Hurry
Up Yost in Story and Song. Lawton himself was, the Regents
declared, known as "Mr. Michigan."
Gerald R. "Flippum Back" Ford, the Michigan football center in the
1930s, later became the Prexy of the United States. Another Michigan
undergraduate 40 years later had a much less flamboyant nickname:
Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone was known to her friends merely as "Nonnie."
In the old days, faculty had nicknames too.
Fred Newton Scott, the pioneering teacher of journalism a century
ago, was known as "Fig" (< "Fig
Newton"), and Professor H. H. Higbee of Mechanical Engineering suffered
from the nickname "Horrible Harry."
William D. Revelli, the famous director of
the Michigan Marching Band, was called "Chief," and Hazel Marie Losh '24 PhD, our celebrated
astronomy teacher, was "Doc."
William R. Mann, the dean of the Dental School,
spent so much time in Latin America that he was known among the
students of his day as "the Invisible Mann."
Nicknames, even the demeaning ones, arise and thrive
when communities are close and knowledge of prominent people is
widely shared. In the 21st-century megaversity, we have become "specialized"
and not so well acquainted. So it's not surprising, perhaps, that
the famous personalities on campus today seldom have well-known
nicknames: Coaches Amaker, Carr and Hutchins seem not to have nicknames
other than the ones they had when they arrived here.
But that doesn't mean there aren't any nicknames. The U-M electronic
directory enables participants to enter their formal names as well
as various other names by which they might be known here and abroad.
Here are some from the current directory: Chunky, Cranky, Dinky,
Muffy,Pinky, Sleepy, Sooty (chosen to honor the user's cat),
Spanky, Twinkie, Weezy, Wheezy. President Coleman has
not yet listed among her array of names Prexy , and it's
available.
So nicknames may not be quite what they were. But they're still
around.
Richard
W. Bailey is the Fred Newton Scott Collegiate Professor
of English. His most recent book is Rogue Scholar: The
Sinister Life and Celebrated Death of Edward H. Rulloff,
University of Michigan Press, 2003 - a biography of an American
thief, impostor, murderer and would-be philologist who lived from
1821 to1871. It was published by the University
of Michigan Press in August.
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