Life, food, events, and community in Albuquerque, NM

How to Create--and Keep--a Cool Nickname for Your Town

What’s the use of living somewhere cool if your town doesn’t have a nickname to match its coolness? Driving past a Q billboard on I-25 reminds me that Albuquerque residents have already solved this problem and now others can, too, using the method described below. A chart follows, for visual learners.

Start with an early version of your town’s name, say, Alburquerque for Albuquerque, or New Amsterdam for New York. This allows you to honor history. Then, drop the first two letters of the old name. This allows you to honor history, but not too much. Next, adapt the excellent advice of Strunk & White: omit needless characters. Do this by dropping any spaces or repeats of consonants from the newly formed first and second syllables. It’s important that a nickname be short, so any syllables beyond these two are now extraneous and should be dropped as well. This leaves your town’s new, cool nickname. Honor it as you would a secret handshake. Meanwhile, let promoters tell outsiders your town’s nickname is actually “The” something.

This is why we call our town Burque and why no one we actually know will ever call it The Q. It is also why we may think of New York as The Big Apple but all the cool people there call it Wamster.

ALBURQUERQUE > BURQUERQUE > BURQUEQUE > BURQUE
NEW AMSTERDAM > W_AMSTERDAM > WAMSTERDAM > WAMSTER

10 Comments

Comment by chantal on January 4, 2008 at 9:32pm

Comment by Sí Serrano aka psychomom on January 4, 2008 at 10:18pm: Soy de Spaña e Club Med
Española - Spañola - Spaña
Medanales - Medianalgas - Club Med
Oralé

Comment by SoyJames on January 5, 2008 at 8:52am: :o

Comment by Mary Schmidt on January 5, 2008 at 9:15am: Or, "Um, how do you spell that?" - 'cuz that's what people generally ask me when I'm giving them my address and they're anywhere but here. Course that's not very catchy!

I love and use "querque"...and like "keep it querque" - granted, I'm prejudiced since I'm a member of AIBA...but "Keep it weird" was already taken by Austin, another of my favorite - um - quirky places. ;-)

Now, if someone would follow the example of the Hotel San Jose in Austin and renovate El Rey..

Wamster???? Guess I'm not cool...duh-oh.

Comment by pineapple_yum on January 5, 2008 at 10:05am: I know I'm not playing by your word-letter rules, but I affectionately call this city "smallbuquerque".
I find it cozy here - with it's only 2 degrees of separation.

Comment by Uncle Jess on January 5, 2008 at 12:11pm: So, heading south on I25, you would pass thru LoLu, Blen, and Socco....LOL

Comment by Adelita on January 5, 2008 at 4:46pm: Soy Burquena! I hate "Q". No native I know would ever say "Soy de Q"!!!!

Psychomom - Medianalgas?! Hahahahahaha! I love that!

Comment by Izquierdo on January 6, 2008 at 3:40pm: Socorro is a devilish place to pronounce. I-25 tourists call is SOCK-a-row. Non Hispanic locals mostly call it Suck-COR-a. That's the way Jane Russell pronounced it in her movie debut, The Outlaw, as she lay in a haystack being ravished by Billy the Kid (Jack Beutel, I think)..."I'm from Suck-COR-a", she said, breasts heaving. The Spanish pronounciation, of course is Soak-CORE-rro. If you watch the sock-suck-soak syllable you can fit into any group of Socorrophiles..

Comment by Samantha Anne Scott on January 7, 2008 at 6:07pm: Neat.

Comment by Pat O. on April 13, 2008 at 10:46am: Soccoro: I always pronounce it as suckCORrow. Can't roll those double Rs--English doesn't have that sound built into the language, so it sounds weird to native English speakers.
It's sorta like the "th" sound as in "the" or "that," which is apparently unique to English, and is disconcerting to people trying to learn the language.

On Abq:

I alway loved "I musta taken a wrong toin at Albakoikey,"--Bugs Bunny.

How to Create--and Keep--a Cool Nickname for Your Town

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