A woman who shall remain nameless asked us to investigate a number of nicknames in various idiomatic expressions. Honest to Pete, we were surprised at the number of terms we found. By far, the majority of them—whipping tom, stinking willie, staggering bob, smart alec, for example—include a common nickname without a known real-life source. A few (silly Billy, purportedly after English King William IV, and namby-pamby, after a derisive nickname given English poet Ambrose Philips) are based on real people. (来源：英语学习门户网站EnglishCN.com)

But we came upon one nickname-based term whose path from referring to a particular person to a general event crossed languages, cultures, and centuries, and is far from straightforward. A bamboche is a social get-together in Haiti characterized by noisy singing and dancing. That term comes from the Italian nickname Bamboccio (literally, "the simpleton," but used here to mean "the Cripple"), a derogatory term applied to 17th-century painter Pieter van Laar. The Dutchman's genre, paintings of bucolic themes that often featured drinking scenes, became known as bambocciata.

The term for that type of painting turned into the French bambochade, meaning "spree." In the American French spoken in Haiti, bambochade developed (via back-formation) into bamboche, thereby bringing to life the art depicted on canvas.