My name is Doug.
I have also been called by many different combinations and variations of the nickname Slug.
It all started as “Slugger” way back in 1990 about a month after I arrived at university. We were talking about one of my high school guidance counsellors and his penchant for calling people “tiger” and “sport”. So, naturally, we started doing the same ‘cuz that is what we do. We repeat a joke again and again until it dies a horrible death or ends up becoming a part of our regular life and seems quite normal. Somehow the name Slugger stuck.
So did Sluggo. This has two possible origins. One of my friends thought that I looked like Sluggo from the Nancy comics and thought that it was a natural progression from Slugger. Rightly so, though I debate the looking like a comic character. The other (and the one that I hold to be the most factual) is that not only were we calling everyone by snappy nicknames based on creepy guidance counsellors, we were also taking regular names and adding “o” to the end like: Steve + o = Steve-o and Mark+o=Mark-o etc. etc. ha ha ha. Well naturally we got around to Slugger because I was no longer known as Doug (though Dougo may have been interesting). And Sluggero just didn’t seem right. But, because many names are naturally shortened ( Steven becomes Steve, Douglas becomes Doug) Slugger was shortened to Slug (which in everyday conversation had already started. I suppose it’s natural.) and soon became Slug-o or Sluggo. Boy did that stick!
Later there were many variations.
Slugs
Slugarooski
Slugfest
and the one variation that has stuck the most is Slugore.
Slugore was the name used by one of my room mates. It came from a transformation we would do to words ending in “er”. So, instead of say, ‘runner’ we would say ‘runnor’, or instead of fighter we would say ‘fightor’ with real emphasis on the ‘or’. Naturally ‘Slugger’ became ‘Sluggor’. Very complicated and intellectual stuff really. He and I always thought that it sounded very Transylvanian and a little more like a real name than Slugger which always had a baseball connotation that went along with it that never sat right with me. With that in mind we changed the original short sounding ‘u’ of Slug into the long sounding ‘oo’ of an umlaut by removing a ‘g’ and adding an ‘e’ to get Slugore. Boom! the birth of a new name.
Slugore ended up being the name of choice for my online presence since there appear to be many, many Slugs, Sluggers and Sluggos out there. But there seemed to be only one Slugore. Me.
So why the name Slug is Doug for a blog?
Slug and all of its (his?) variations came to represent a person or various persons that I had become over the years. I was even first introduced to my (future at the time) wife as Slugger by one of her friends that was setting us up together. I have no idea what made such a great woman like my wife ever agree to meet a guy named Slugger but I am glad that she did. I began to feel that perhaps it was time to try to lose (or absorb) the Slug in me and find the Doug in me again and let him shine. I think it is a work in progress and well, I guess that I am going to document it here!
Cheers,
Doug aka Slugger, Slug, Slugs, Sluggo, Slugarooski, Slugfest, Sluggor and Slugore. 😉
Slug is Doug 