He had no doubts about breaking up his first great team and bringing on the Busby Babes - a sobriquet, incidentally, he disliked.
Punta del Este does not quite live up to its sobriquet: it's a collection of apartment blocks where Argentinians come to buy their Gucci.
Among colleagues, his supposed cunning earned him the sobriquet of "Reynard", after the fox associated with trickery in European fairytales, while inevitable comparisons have also been made with Labour's Peter Mandelson.
It is known, rather unoriginally, as the Very Large Telescope (VLT), but this dull sobriquet conceals a design of great daring.Large telescopes are desirable both because they collect more light (and can therefore see fainter objects), and because they can disentangle the images of things that are too close together to be separated by smaller ones.
Especially through his control of cross-border smuggling, he earned a lot of money and the sobriquet Mr Marlboro.But the Algerian media were always full of tales of squabbles between Mr Belmokhtar, who has boasted that he had been close to al-Qaeda since the 1990s, and the Algerian leader of AQIM, Abdelmalek Droukdel.
Mr Welch earned the sobriquet Neutron Jack by analogy with the neutron bomb, which kills people but leaves buildings intact.
Often described as "the race that stops a nation", the cup's sobriquet was now being applied to Qantas.The airline known as the "flying kangaroo", from its iconic tail-fin emblem, is Australia's oldest and biggest commercial carrier.
Too often, historians of the second world war have seen their subject as set apart from other wars by its sheer geographical extent, its special barbarisms, its claim to be the only war to earn the unenviable sobriquet of "total war".
Her father earned this sobriquet from the slaughter in East Pakistan as Bangladesh struggled to be born.
Mr Sarkozy would energetically orchestrate a common Franco-German line ahead of and after EU summits, which led to the sobriquet "Merkozy".
As their "nano" sobriquet suggests, their dimensions are measured in billionths of a metre, which makes them hard to handle.
