When my ex-husband and I were dating we were obscenely sweet and cutsie.
We had the typical nicknames for each other at first…“sweetie” being predomenant.
Somehow we ended up applying the suffix -opotamus (as in hippo…) to words. Namely, “sweetapotomus” instead of “sweetie”. (Naturally “hippo” must be a type of “potamus”, right?) Any descriptive word could be used (and sometimes twisted) into the suffix. For example, if I was cooking, I was a “fixopotamus of dinner”. If he was going to the store, he was a “driveapotamus”. If you promised something, you said “I’m a promapotomus” to show you really meant it. It was all rather amusing to us and nauseating to others.
Then the bastardizations began.
“Sweetopotamus“ became transposed into “Mopasweetamus” “Sweetamopatus” and any number of other strange things.
From these came the shortened versions… “Sweetamopatus” became “Sway Mop”… and eventually just “Mop” (In fact by the end of our marriage, 15 years later, our most common casual form of address for each other was simply “Mop”)
Here we interject another trend. From the Amy and Amiability episode of Black Adder, we latched onto the phrase “flipping great wadges of cash”…
And thus began phrases like “I love you flipping great wadges” (usually answered by the phrase “I love you gobs”) which became “I love you wadges” ( “I love you gobs” ) which mutated into “I love you like a wadge” ( “I love you like a gob” ) and finally “I love you, wadge” ( “I love you, gob” )
The names intermingled. “Mop-wadge” “Wadgeamop” etc..
While this was happening, new suffixes emerged.
“Mop-a-thon” became common.
“Mop” and various rhyming words such as “Splop” came into play a lot, but weren’t neccessary. Here follows a list of such names:
“Mopalong”
“WobbleSplop”
“Mop-go-splop”
“Mopalonius”
“Mop-a-lop-a-ding-dong”
“Wadgeathon”
“Mophead”
“Splodge”
“Wadge-ule” (rhymes with “module”)
“Splodgule” (see above)
and a recurrance of the old -opotamus with “Wadgeopotamus” and “Mopopotamus” coming out every now and again.
And the even more elaborate…
“Wadgeopotamus of Blobs”
“Mopalotamus of Globs”
“Wadgeasplopamus of Mops”…
Creativity becomes the key. You get the idea. I fully admit it got out of hand.
…at least once, I remember him calling me “Wadgeabojangles”…
02/05/09 Edited to add: this article was mentioned in the Chicago Tribune today!
— 01:00:16 PM
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