User Name Etymology

Revisted Friday Foo

[ukgimp]

I did this well over a year ago and I know a lot of people have joined since then. I am sure I am not the only one to wonder where in the hell some of the user names come form and what their origins are.

Well mine came about just before I went to do a series of presentations on Australia in 2000. I was setting up a hotmail account and I had to move away from the PC during the sign up process. In that short interval a joker decided to change and submit my details. You guessed it he changed it to ukgimp. I could not be bothered to change it so a gimp was born.

Care to share yours?

[killroy]

I've picked mine up in tha dark days of the mid 80s, when I was around 5 or 6 (my dad was a computer developer in those times and I grew up amidst stacks of hardware). It kinda stuck, and only later did I learn about the origin of the name from that american postal officer during the first world war, placing his graffiti upon the parcels passing through his station.

Pity it seems a popular name for pest control and particular cockroaches, which made it hard to stake my claim upon the net by the time I woke up to it.

SN

[Sinner_G]

It was a tough choice between:

Sinner_G
Inter-Raptor
K.O.Tick
D-Pressed

That was when I was a teenie and wanted to be a hacker when grown up.

[digitalghost]

There was a time when I earned my living as a ghost writer, and I did all my work on a PC. Prior to that, (quite a few years prior to that), I wanted to be a hacker. VaporTrail was my name then, as in "leave a vapor trail, not a paper trail". I once said, "you don't want to go in like a trooper, with guns blazing, you want to go in like force recon, at night, arrive, strike and leave before anyone knows you're there, like digital ghosts.". For some reason, that name haunted me. :)

[tosspot17]

Hmmmmm, I got a few questions about mine at PubCon ;)

It came about becuase I used it for a hotmail email addy when I was at school - It came from my dad saying it alot ;) and a radio show in the UK where 'Mark and Lard' the presenters would use the expression alot too.

The 17? Well [e-mail] had already gone, and hotmail suggested 17. :)

Tosspot
(n.) A toper; one habitually given to strong drink; a drunkard.

[lawman]

I once said, "you don't want to go in like a trooper, with guns blazing, you want to go in like force recon, at night, arrive, strike and leave before anyone knows you're there, like digital ghosts."

I've always respected you. Now I'm afraid of you.

:)

lawman

[digitalghost]

Aww Lawman, I learned the words to the song by heart, I fight authority, 'thority always wins... ;)

[richardb]

Thanks for the clarification Gimp, and I always thought you were some kina pervert ;)

LOL to the rest and yes LM I can ditto that 1, eeek

Mine, didn’t expect to hang around for long, so the minimum amount of effort went into it. You just need add three letters and bingo.

Rich

[Ivana]

My username is actually my real name. My parents were pretentious pseudo-hippies and wanted unique names for their children (my sister is called Ursula). I was always picked on in school because it's such an alien name and I still have to spell my name. People often think I'm from Russia or some Eastern European country. Quite often people insist that I have a Russian accent! After I married but kept my maiden name which is quite normal and Danish, people think I'm a mail order bride from Poland who married a Dane (where as I actually married a Brit).

I'd seen a lot of people using online aliases that were really difficult to pronounce or just really strange, so I thought I might as well use my own name because I couldn't bear having to explain any more names!

The anonymity surrounding aliases online never really interested me. It's always been difficult for me to not get noticed on my name and by using a 'real' name as opposed to something obviously made up, I hope to remain relatively unnoticed.

[Rossie]

Had this nickname on and off since I was born. I guess when your actual name is only one syllable long people can't shorten it so they have to add something on the end.

Ross

[mivox]

...by using a 'real' name as opposed to something obviously made up, I hope to remain relatively unnoticed.

Hiding in plain view, eh? Well, it works a treat for my car keys at home...

Mine is a made up domain name... I wanted "IlMio.com" (traslates roughly as: "My Dot Com" Witty, eh? ;) ) Of course it was already taken... as were all the other similarly too-clever-for-their-own-good foreign phrases. So I made one up: If you liberally bastardize Italian and Latin, toss them in a blender, and hit 'puree' you may end up with "Mi Vox" ('mee-vox', not 'my-vox') somewhat vaguely suggesting a meaning of "My Voice." I've met one person who guessed the meaning right off the bat.

Once you go to that much trouble over a personal domain name, you try to get as much use out of it as possible. ;)

[Ivana]

Shakespeare wrote about the function of the name:

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet."

--From Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

What he means is that the name is arbitrary and its only function to refers to the object. We attach meaning or emotions to the name.

[4eyes]

I actually have four eyes.

No, Really I do.

I am part man, part Anableps anableps

Its a long story.

[Ivana]

Didn't you get this very special 4eyes poster at Boston PubCon?

[Nick_W]

I'm just dead dull. I started as nwilson as I just wanted an answer to a quick question [webmasterworld.com].

Then I became Nick_W cos I liked the way it looked ;)

Nick

[bird]

"My Voice." I've met one person who guessed the meaning right off the bat.

For the others, it was so obvious that they didn't consider it worth mentioning... ;)

Guess the same goes for mine, eh?

[Nick_W]

You squawk? ;)

Nick

[TheDave]

Hmm, well there's not much thought in my name ;) Dave was taken, and I thought 'how dare he!' I'm The Dave! :P

[WildAngel]

my name was given to me by my friends because i look really innocent but have a really wild/naughty nature;-)

[4eyes]

Didn't you get this very special 4eyes poster at Boston PubCon?

Yep, still have it.

One day I'll post a piccie

[deejay]

deejay = D J = Deanna Jean

I weren't feeling reel kreatif that day.

Mivox.. loved your name from the first time I saw it.. and yeah, I got the meaning straight off. :}

[mivox]

hmmm... so it's just the idiots back home that didn't get it. Well, that's reassuring. :) I'm not a complete loon after all...

Shut up, all of you! hehehehe

[2oddSox]

Sometimes I'm in a hurry.

Mivox, everytime I see your name I think of Ultravox and get flashbacks to the 80's. It's way cool.

2odd...

[dragonlady7]

I figured out what mivox was probably about...

I wrote a novel when i was eleven. There were dragons. And a lady.
When looking for a username that wasn't taken on Yahoo or something, I tried various permutations of dragons and ladies.
i ended up dragonlady007 on there. The seven was significant in the novel somehow, and putting two 0s in front of it made me feel like a superspy. But I tried to pare out excess characters. Back down to 7...
It's a silly name, and I should've chosen something cooler or more professional or whatever, but at least-- it's never taken!
I dominate the SERPs for it too. Good to have, I guess. Can't figure out how to get a domain name out of it, though.

[Lilliabeth]

Years ago when my daughter had to be away fom home, I sort of ran out things to write in letters so I wrote a story that resembled Cinderella, and all the character names were take-offs on my daughter's name and our pets names.

We had a cat named Tigerlilly who was represented in the story as one of the sisters - Lilliabeth.

I borrowed it when that cat wouldn't leave the keyboard alone while I was trying to set up an account.

[bakedjake]

Years ago my first girlfriend said I was always confused about things. She called me bakedjake.

[photon]

As a geek in high school I often took pictures of people, then left prints for them signed only "The Photonic Photographer". I shortened that for the nick.

However, I choose to ignore that now and make allusions to light and darkness, the nature of duality, and anything else that has more dignity than that stupid high school story. :)

[bunltd]

Mine's been with me for a long time, even pre-internet. It's a short version of "be unlimited" - Last name also starts with a B, so it works on that level too. Guess that makes me a bit of an optimist.

LisaB

no, it it has nothing to do with "buns" ;)

[ppg]

>Anableps anableps

must be handy when you drop the soap in the bath.

My first name's Paul and I used to live in Palmers Green. I was forever phoning up my local pirate radio station for rewinds, and they got to know me as Paul in Palmers Green, then became ppg for short.

And no, it hads NOTHING to do with the Power Puff Girls!

[pendanticist]

Miss-typed it during sign-up, but kept it anyway.

Pedant-icist: "ped·ant ( P ) Pronunciation Key (ped'nt) n.

1. One who pays undue attention to book learning and formal rules.

2. One who exhibits one's learning or scholarship ostentatiously.

3. Obsolete. A schoolmaster."

Since my then new domain was academically focused, I decided to thesorus-ize "Academia" and the rest is history.

Pendanticist <- Insinuates I have an undue affection for things pendantistic, or that I might be a pendantophile. Let me assure you, that is not the case. :)

Pedanticist a.k.(here)a. Pendanticist.