ISO a nickname worthy of LA Rams’ Aaron Donald

Cheat code

I’ve been told some call AD “Cheat Code” and while I kind of like that, it doesn’t strike me as very fearsome. And a bit too, well, millennial. If you’ve never played a video game, or some iteration of Madden in the past eight years, the nickname means very little. Nicknames must be ageless. Universal.  Some consensus work or words that can conjure up the same image in minds like rubbing the same lamp would conjure the same genie, no matter who was doing the rubbing.

Cheat code just doesn’t cut the mustard folks. Sorry.

The word nickname actually comes from the Middle English “eke name,” or extra name. It’s a substitute, a fill-in-the-blank for a given name. An informal form of address that can alternately show deference, or respect, even endearment. In the days of World War II, it was an intimate way of acknowledging a friend in the worst of wartime circumstances. It was acceptable bro-love at a time when manliness required stoic behavior. It showed a bit of love, familiarity, and respect at a time when lives were lost on a daily basis.

And in a modern-day NFL locker room, most definitely respect continues.

But there’s a curious thing about the very best nicknames.  They don’t always make a lotta’ sense. (and sometimes, the less sense they make the better!)  They kinda’ sprout up, organically,  willy-nilly.

Like mushrooms after a rain. No rhyme, no reason. (Although it helps to have a rhyme, helps to have a compelling reason.)

If a seed falls on concrete, it doesn’t sprout, right? The conditions gotta’ be right.

Case in point: If a bunch of bumblebees had never stung legendary NFL “Bum” Phillips as a small boy, and he told his Mom they were “bummel-bees”  we’d know him better as Oail Andrew Phillips, instead of Bum.  (That’s not a typo, folks. His first name is really Oail. I’m not even sure how to pronounce Oail. Or maybe, if you have a first name nobody else can pronounce, you’re fertile ground to get a nickname hung on you as a kid that’ll stick to you the rest of your life, like it or not.)

“Bum” sounds football. “AD,” not so much. AD sounds more like a term used by an archaeologist discussing a recent digsite. A cavernous treasure trove of antiquities. Not so much an NFL nickname.