What’s in a school nickname?

‘Have you met Sperm?’ a friend from Westminster School asked me at a teenage party once. Sperm was a charming, pretty, confident girl but, still, I didn’t feel quite ready to use her startling nickname on our first meeting.  

My own nickname – Mons, Latin for Mountain or Mount – seemed unadventurously fogeyish by comparison. I didn’t pass it on to Sperm.  

Old school nicknames can be fantastically rude – but the ruder they are, the more affectionate. Sperm happily responded to the nickname – and her friends used it in an utterly friendly way. They had long detached the word’s meaning from its use as a name.  

Canvassing my friends, they came up with some extraordinarily insulting names that their schoolfriends still use now they are in middle age: Deafy (a hard-of-hearing boy); Conehead, lovingly abbreviated to Cone; Cyclops, the boy who lost his eye in a javelin accident on sports day; and Sauerkraut, the German girl at an English boarding school.