So according to Darin, the only reason Sprigg figured he had a connection to Scanlan was because of the both being gnomes part, and halfway through he realized that the real connection was kind of happening with Keyleth. He didn’t mention Ioun once during that explanation.
Seems like we again overestimated the amount of planning Matt includes the other players in. That probably also means that the nicknames were Darin’s own opinions on the characters from the way he watched the show and don’t necessarily reflect how Matt thinks about them. Oh well. More than another week to stew on this.