If you watch much television from the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand, you’re likely to run into a naming convention that is completely confounding from an outside perspective. Jeremy Clarkson, one of the hosts of the U.K.’s Top Gear, is referred to as Jez or Jezza. Same with Jeremy Usborne, a fictional character on Peep Show. Actor and musician Laurence Fox goes by Lozza; his Twitter handle is @LozzaFox. Harry Styles, of One Direction, goes by Hazza. Actress Teresa Palmer goes by Tez, or Tezza.
The U.K., with a higher number of celebrities that break onto the international scene compared with Australia and New Zealand, is a good source of these weird nicknames. But looking into this more, I found that it’s actually in Australia where we can see the extreme of this sort of naming behavior. Australian English is a jumble of abbreviations, diminutives, and what are called hypocoristics. Here’s an only slightly weird sentence that you might hear in Australia: “I had an avo sammie in the arvo with my sparky mate Daz at the servo.”
“It’s difficult to grow up in Australia and not have a hypocoristic version of your name,” says Evan Kidd, a psycholinguist from Melbourne currently working at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Hypocoristics are certain types of nicknames for people, objects, or concepts, but they don’t work exactly like other nicknames. For one thing, a hypocoristic form of a word isn’t necessarily shorter; often it’s the exact same number of syllables as the full word.
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