I’m from “Ye Olde Kingdom of Navarra” (for publicity-related reasons, it’s now being written as “Reyno de Navarra” rather than Reino, which is the current Spanish spelling), one of the medieval kingdoms that eventually became the current Kingdom of Spain. I fit a lot of Navarrese stereotypes, from the thick walker’s legs to the “better not talk 'bout politics with 'em”. Since most of you foreigners have problems with Spanish R’s, I chopped off the last syllable.
I’m a classically-trained singer.
Fach is German for “compartment”, “cubby hole”, or “pigeon hole”. It also refers to voice type, in a more specific way than the traditional bass, tenor, alto, and soprano do, referring to not only range, but weight (vocal, not physical), tessitura, and other things. Great word, by the way, leading to many an unintentional pun, as when my now wife, in a pique of identity confusion (vacillating between lyric mezzo and dramatic soprano) exclaimed “I just need a good Fach!” Verwirrt means confused; like my wife, I spent many years not knowing quite what I was, wandering back and forth between lyrico-spinto baritone and dramatic tenor.
So, in short, I’m confused about small containers.
I’ve always been fond of the Trickster in myth and popular culture.
When I first discovered the Internet, back in the 80s, I ended up using the nickname “Screw-up” to embody the set of trickster traits I most related with. Alas, college kids being who and what they are, I kept getting people jumping to conclusions about it being actually a sexually explicit name and the moderators of where I was hanging out insisted I change my name to something less potentially offensive.
When “Oppressed” didn’t sit too well with them, I eventually ended up with “Loki” as my online persona. Given the way that sexuality tripped up what I felt had been a completely innocent phrase taken as a name, I enjoyed reminding people, as often as possible, that Loki is one of the more flamboyant gender-bender figures out there - how many deities can one name that have both mothered and fathered children, after all?
When I ended up joining AOL I couldn’t be simply “Loki” - there were too many others out there. And I refused to be “Lokisomenumber.” IRL I’m a Mike. I’ve spent too much time being one of the clones to find that appealing for an online persona. I decided to try fitting one of my hobbies to the name Loki to come up with a unique name, and chose Otaku, which is a Japanese word which means, among other things, a fan*. And so I became “OtakuLoki,” a trickster who likes his cartoons, and I use it for almost all of my online interactions.
*I’m well aware of the negative connotations of the word, especially in Japan, that is an implication of fanaticism, not simply enjoying a hobby. However, the US meaning of the word is far less negative, or at least was at the time.
It’s Mange Tout - meaning ‘eat all’ in French. I myself am not French, but I do like eating things.
This declaration will be met with surprise, argument and denial by those:
–Who thought it was Man Get Out
–Who thought it was just another name for snow peas
–Who didn’t realise until now that Mangetout and Mangeorge were different members.
–Who had always misread it as Magnet Out, or Mangey Trout
–Who thought Mange Tout was a term to describe someone aggressively selling skin diseases.
I always enjoy these threads. I have been fascinated by reptiles since I was a little kid, particularly snakes, and most especially rattlesnakes. Crotalus is the name of the genus which includes most rattlesnakes. I don’t bite.
Being a grumpy cynic who was known as **Diogenes ** on another message board, I wanted the same name here. Couldn’t have it. Couldn’t even have Diogenes the Cynic for some reason. So I picked on a name from C S Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet; it’s both the Martian name for Mars and the name of the archangelic oyarsa who runs the place. I likes me some C S L. I’ve since grown used to the name and use it elsewhere.
Eh. Not very interesting. Trouble was my kitty. Someone had already used Trouble. So I became TroubleAgain.
It’s rather common typo, and since I enjoy idea of gods I found this name hilarious. No, I’m not polytheist, but I like concept of supernatural beings that are not The God, but just gods. And one of them dedicated to fluffy furballs enjoying wetting themselves and chewing on shoes was even more hilarious. For additional fun, I’m more of a cat person.
Translated, it’s Czech for “lawyer” (and Russian, I think, and maybe a few other Slavic languages). “Prav” is the root for “truth” (as in “pravda”) and the suffix “-nik” is something like our “-er,” so literally it would translate to something like “truther.”
Mine’s a pun. I like puns.
That’s really all there is to the story…
Count me in as one of the latter, until about 5 years ago (I lurked for 9, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere), when I was looking at something or another in French. :smack:
Back when I was a BBS user, I went by Spider. My first girlfriend had given me that nickname, for my lurker nature. Then somebody invented this intarweb thingy, and Spider became rather cliché.
Around the same time, I made two issues of a zine. In the first issue, I had a multiple-choice “name the zine” contest. The response was underwhelming–I didn’t get more than one vote for any of the names that I had thought of. However, a prominent local zine-maker who always wrote with a conspiracy-theorist persona sent in a (tongue-in-cheek?) write-in vote for Tool of the Conspiracy, and I took it. If the voting had gone differently, I might be Monster from the Id, Heroine Kills, Tiger on Vaseline, or one of the other potential zine names here.
Clothahump is the name of the Elderly Turtle Wizard in Alan Dean Foster’s Spellsinger novel series.
My kids were telling me a story of alien invaders and an attack from the third dimension. I listened as straight faced as I could, told them it was excellent and riveting and terrifying, then pointed out that we live in the third dimension, and that they might want to have the attack coming from a higher dimension like 5 or 7.
I love the flatlandish idea of invaders from the dimension of ‘depth’ or ‘height’.
I took mine from the great Roman general Fabius Maximus, whose masterly delaying tactics I greatly admired when we studied him in Latin at school.
For those of a classical bent, the Latin verb “to delay” is cunctor, cunctari, cunctatus sum.
It could have been outy, but my baby finger felt more comfortable on the “r” than the “t”. I had been typing left handed in the dark and that was the easiest login name I could think of since I had been kicked out using my previous name “Z”. And before that it had been “N”(I told folks I fell on my ass/face), but I had been kicked out under that also.
NO, I was not a lurker or troll, but under that sites rules, if you let you membership lapse before it expires, you cannot use your old login name.
The “L” was added because they do not allow four letter names.
I actually just started a thread about this over here.
I left it uncapitalized because that’s how it seemed to be spoken. So unremarkable. Just some white dude.
It’s just German for “I-am you-are.” I wanted a name with few associations, after having left a messageboard where things got a little too personal. I was listening to a lot of dub (King Tubby & Lee Perry) at the time, and thought the “dubbist” association was funny. (I know it ain’t.) My runner-up was Palm-Wine Drinkard..
I’ve recently thought of a much better one, which I may adopt at some point.
Had a previous incarnation–just “Aleq” from back in the day but went away for a while and kinda forgot the login and whatnot. Didn’t have the email address I used by then either. So I added the “Smart” bit because I like it better. “Aleq” is a name I’ve been using since the 80’s on BBS’s and it’s an elision of my SCA name. Riveting, huh?
I had just read the jungle book, so I became the hero pinniped 