India?" and "Let us go and call upon Old Sykes" or "Old
Roots" or "Old Conic-Sections,"--thus meaning to designate
Professor----, LL.D., A.A.S., F.R.S., etc. A college president who had
no nickname would prove himself, _ipso facto_, unfit for his post. It is
only dreadfully affected people who talk of "Tully"; the sensible all
cling to the familiar "Chick-Pea" or Cicero, by which the wart-faced
orator was distinguished. For it is not the boys only, but all American
men, who love nicknames, the idioms of nomenclature. The first thing
which is done, after a nominating convention has made its platform and
balloted for its candidates, is to discover or invent a nickname: Old
Hickory, Tippecanoe, The Little Giant, The Little Magician, The Mill-Boy
of the Slashes, Honest John, Harry of the West, Black Dan, Old Buck, Old
Rough and Ready. A "good name" is a tower of strength and many votes.

And not only with candidates for office, the spots on whose "white
garments" are eagerly sought for and labelled, but in the names of
places and classes the principle prevails, the democratic or Saxon
tongue gets the advantage. Thus, we have for our states, cities, and
ships-of-war the title of fondness which drives out the legal title of
ceremony. Are we not "Yankees" to the world, though to the diplomatists
"citizens of the United States of America"? We have a Union made up upon
the map of Maine, New Hampshire, etc., to California; we have another in
the newspapers, composed of the Lumber State, the Granite State, the
Green-Mountain State, the Nutmeg State, the Empire State, the Keystone
State, the Blue Hen, the Old Dominion, of Hoosiers, Crackers, Suckers,
Badgers, Wolverines, the Palmetto State, and Eldorado. We have the
Crescent City, the Quaker City, the Empire City, the Forest City, the
Monumental City, the City of Magnificent Distances. We hear of Old
Ironsides sent to the Mediterranean to relieve the Old Tea-Wagon,
ordered home. Everywhere there obtains the Papal principle of taking a
new title upon succeeding to any primacy. The Norman imposed his laws
upon England; the courts, the parish-registers, the Acts of Parliament
were all his; but to this day there are districts of the Saxon Island
where the postman and census-taker inquire in vain for Adam Smith and
Benjamin Brown, but must perforce seek out Bullhead and Bandyshins. So
indomitable is the Saxon.

We have not done yet with our national idioms. In the seaboard towns
nauti