Monday, January 4, 2010

Give a dog a bad name

There's been some uncertainty about what clever nickname to give Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. I've heard some doozies but many of the clever ones are simply too long and unwieldy. The shorter names in contention were:

Undi-Bomber: This is visually a decent play on UnaBomber but doesn't really work sound-wise.

BVD Bomber: Some nice alliteration and all those similar sounds are good but this is kind of a tongue twister.

Then I saw a great one.

KnickerBomber (sometimes Knicker-Bomber): Kind of a whole retro thing with it’s derivation from “knickerbocker” plus the use of “knicker” is nicely derogatory with its silly underwear implication. And talk about somebody getting his knickers in a twist.

I thought that was going to be hard to beat but when I told my husband about it, he came up with a real beaut.

Fruit of the Boom: This is it for me. Now it’s important to realize that the usage of Fruit of the Boom will be different from the usage of the other possibilities. So while you would say:

You’d think someone would have paid attention when the KnickerBomber checked in with no luggage and paid cash for his ticket.


when you use “Fruit of the Boom” you drop “the” and simply say:

You’d think someone would have paid attention when Fruit of the Boom checked in with no luggage and paid cash for his ticket.


You can also abbreviate this as “FotB” - which I understand is nice for all that Twittering stuff - although a friend raises a good question: would you pronounce the abbreviation as separate letters - F-O-T-B - or as two syllables - Fot-B? I prefer the latter but I’m prepared to allow for some individual variation here. Kind of like the whole “twenty-ten” versus “two-thousand ten” thing.

1 comment:

Lynne said...

I thought KnickerBomber was pretty cute, too.
Fruit of the Boom reminds me of something I once said about one of my sweetheart's relatives. This person displayed such overweening pride in their family tree that I started referring to my sweetheart as "the Fruit of the Tomb."
My sweetie loved it. The relative, not so much.

Happy New Year to you, btw.