One of the many problems that Falcon writers face is coming up with oh-so-clever nicknames for their personal columns. This problem usually makes its appearance the night before an issue is scheduled to be sent to the printer, when the journalism room is a mixture of chaos, stress and excitement.

During this time, there’s little time to be creative. At most, the layout artist gives you a solid five minutes to decide on the nickname, so it’s often best to go with one that is classic, if not a little boring or ridiculous.
Alliteration is always quite easy in a pinch, like in-depth editor and junior Debbie Soung’s nickname “Dangerously Debbie.” Unfortunately, for those of us with names starting with common letters, past writers have already taken all the good adjectives.
When alliteration doesn’t work out, a play on words with your name is always a crowd pleaser, or better yet, a funny pun like senior David Eng’s nickname “2 Deng Good.” But for writers who lack wit and/or names helpful to this cause, we’re at another dead end.
If worst comes to worst, there’s always the option of telling the layout artist to come up with a creative nickname for you, playing the old “Umm I don’t know … you can put whatever you want” card. More often than not, they’ll just add any old adjective, to make names like Cool Cristina and Super Sarah, and then call it done. There’s always some amount of risk involved with this move, and frustration on the addled layout artist’s part. And where’s the fun in that?
This is where the benefit of having a clever editor-in-chief comes in. Thanks to senior Christine Bancroft’s somewhat irreverent sense of humor, this dilemma was quickly a thing of the past for many of the new writers on staff this year, putting an end to their struggles.
Within a few months of the start of school, Christine had nicknamed around half of the staff. Some of her best nicknames are so catchy that the whole staff converted to using them (sophomore Nelson Wang’s nickname “Mandela” caught on within weeks).
By giving us an ever-so-clever nickname, Christine solved our trivial dilemma in no time. Fincelli. It has a nice ring to it, right?
Maybe Fincelli is just a mockery of our constant presence around each other during newspaper, a subtle way of making fun of the fact that we are somewhat antisocial in newspaper. We’ll try to work on that.
Or, if we look at it in a more positive light, we could say that Fincelli is simply a compliment to our ability to co-write field hockey stories. Maybe?
Whatever the reason, our nickname has become a part of us. While always a fun topic of conversation, it plays a greater role too. The nickname is like a bond—one that bonds us to each other but also to newspaper. And we’d be lying if we said it wasn’t fun when other people look at us with complete confusion over the topic.
As seniors leave for college and new members are added to the Falcon staff, changes are bound to occur in every regard. Can Fincelli persevere through these conditions, year after year, to remain an accepted nickname? Of course.
Over the last few months, we’ve come to appreciate the convenience of having a nickname. It’s just an added bonus that the nickname sounds super cool too.