Today’s baseball rosters are filled with names, not nicknames, not like the ones that used to be. The N.B.A. playoffs are equally devoid of onomastic pleasures, just cheap echoes of Magic and the Mailman, Tiny and Tree, Chief and Cornbread. The N.F.L. cannot match the treasured nicknames that evoke folk heroes like Night Train, Hacksaw and the Refrigerator.

A part of sports, somewhere near the soul, is slowly dying an unimaginative death. In an age of A-Rod and D-Wade, when nicknames rarely conjure imagery beyond a corporate logo, it can be easy to bemoan the loss of another slice of simpler times.

“There’s no substance there,” said the Hall of Fame basketball player Walt Frazier, also known as Clyde.

But sociologists and experts in onomastics, the study of names, said the diminishment of nicknames was not exclusive to famous athletes. Studies on the subject are few, but there is widespread agreement that the use of nicknames across American society has steadily slipped.