I want to know where some of these crazy Doper names came from. Obviously, in most cases, this thread will require a response from the member named. Please redirect me if this thread has been done before - couldn’t find it. I am, after all, the Defective Detective.
Some names that I have always been curious about:
Exapno Mapcase
Quiddity Glumfuster
Bosda d’Chi of Tricor
I know my name may not seem so interesting, but it was *supposed *to be Selective Detective (two consecutive rhymes from a Billy Joel song that I like), but I had a brain-fart when I was signing up. So now instead of having a name that makes me seem careful and discriminating, I have a name that makes me look like an idiot. I probably deserve it, though I wish I could change it…
Okay, now you try it. Name some names that you would like to see explained. If your name comes up in this thread, please explain it for the rest of us, should you be so inclined.
“Defective Detective”, your name is also the title of a very enjoyable anthology of short stories – all literary detective spoofs. Some are really hysterical. I thought you were a fan of the book.
Quiddity is a delicious word; it sounds nifty and means 1. the quality that makes a thing what it is; the essential nature of a thing.
(dictionary.com)
I thought it needed a surname so made one up that seemed to go with and sounded almost Don Martin-y.
I seem to recall it was Harpo Marx in Cyryllic or Russian (if there’s a difference). Maybe even Greek, since there’s a connection of sorts.
I agree with Bosda’s name. Not long ago (within the past year) he had us try to guess his real name and it fell into the Star Wars name conventions, but damned if I can remember the original name. Might try searching on threads Bosda started.
No help on Quiddity. But I seem to recall there was an explanation.
Keywords to search for in thread titles: username, handle, screenname, etc.
Harpo Marx went to Russia for a comedy tour kind of thing, and Exapno Mapcase was the closest he could come to reading out the Cyrillic letters that say Harpo Marx. He started signing letters that way for fun, IIRC. I couldn’t find a sample Cyrillic version online; I’ll try to reproduce it in Word and post it.
Correct. In 1933 or 1934, Harpo did a solo tour of Russia, as improbable as it seems, and the posters in Cyrillic looked something like,
XAPNO MAPCS
(Excuse my Pig Cyrillic, but it gives you the idea.)
Apparently, he was asked by our government to carry some papers over to our ambassador or some such, so the chapter about the episode in his memoir was titled, “Exapno Mapcase, Secret Agent”.
I’ve always wondered about Qadgop the Mercotan. Wasn’t that a character from some 1950s science fiction movie?
“Qadgop the Mercotan slithered flatly around the after-bulge of the tranship. One claw dug into the meters-thick armour of pure neutronium, then another. Its terrible xmex-like snout locked on. Its zymolosely polydactile tongue crunched out, crashed down, rasped across. Slurp! Slurp! …”
Qadgop the Mercotan slithered flatly around the after-bulge of the tranship. One claw dug into the meters-thick armor of pure neutronium, then another. Its terrible xmex-like snout locked on. Its zymolosely polydactyl tongue crunched out, crashed down, rasped across. Slurp! Slurp! At each abrasive stroke the groove in the tranship’s plating deepened and Qadgop leered more fiercely. Fools! Did they think that the airlessness of absolute space, the heatlessness of absolute zero, the yieldlessness of absolute neutronium could stop QADGOP THE MERCOTAN? And the stowaway, that human wench Cynthia, cowering in helpless terror just beyond this thin and fragile wall…
I assumed that you were a fan of the television series Monk, because that’s the phrase used by USA Networks to describe the character in some of the promos. And as someone said, email a mod if you wish to change it.
The Russian ‘kh’ looks like an X, the ‘r’ looks like a ‘p’ and the ‘p’ looks like an ‘n’. Here’s the Cyrillic alphabet
Harpo Marx would have looked more like XAPNO MAPKC since the ‘K’ is the same in both languages but the ‘s’ looks like ‘c’ (hence CCCP - Сою́з Сове́тских Социалисти́ческих Респу́блик, tr.: Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, SSSR)(translation & Cyrillic from Wiki) Or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
