Chapman’s eccentric character and love for a practical joke saw him being known as a ‘Gooner’, leading some to believe this to be the origin of the nickname.
I took the Chapman bit to mean ‘gooner’ in the older “being a goon” sense: eccentric/fool/prankster, not that it was a fully separate formal nickname origin. But yeah, the article doesn’t really explain why Chapman was called that, so it’s more folklore than etymology. The better answer is probably that Gooners evolved as wordplay from Gunners.
That is the opposite of an explanation.
I took the Chapman bit to mean ‘gooner’ in the older “being a goon” sense: eccentric/fool/prankster, not that it was a fully separate formal nickname origin. But yeah, the article doesn’t really explain why Chapman was called that, so it’s more folklore than etymology. The better answer is probably that Gooners evolved as wordplay from Gunners.
Yeah wasn’t rhyming slang a big thing in London? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyming_slang. It’s not really a rhyme, but the same kind a wordplay.