English Victorian curate Rev. Francis Kilvert was a good friend of my great-great-grandfather’s, and so my ancestors appeared in print when Kilvert’s Diary was published around WWII. I am fan of Kilvert’s writings, and a member of the Kilvert Society, but also a non-believer whose last name conveniently translates as “pagan”.
I think I’ve explained this before in one of these threads, but here goes.
My name is taken from The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide. On page xxiii, in the section “Notes on the Translation,” we find the following:
"The manuscripts that make up Chapters One through Four of this volume were found in a monastery in Wessex in 1272 and survived the Norman Conquest only through extreme good fortune. Though unsigned, they were almost certainly written by Aelfric of Enysham in 1017, as they bore his distinctly alliterative style. The translation was difficult, and only through the tenacity and erudition of your editor is the volume available in this coherent Modern English edition. As it was written well before the Great Vowel Shift, it should be noted that the modern Crow was once known by all as Kyyrewyyoae, and for clarity we have kept this spelling intact. The now-common Servo did not exist in 1017, but a Servo-like creature did! and was klept by the name of Myyckaeoyyn Wod Faecum.
So essentially I’m a very old puppet. Also, my real name contains a ‘Y,’ which is widely acclaimed as the greatest letter. How could I turn down a name with four of them?
I used this name when I signed up at The Motley Fool, and as luck would have it, it was available when I signed up here as well.
At the time, I was working at NEC in their undersea cable division. The names comes from undersea (sub-) fiber optics (-light). The other meaning (slower than light speed) never even dawned on me until much later when I started wondering why I kept getting vanity search hits in Star Wars threads.
The down and the hip says it is just a thing. It sounds fly, it’s the bees knees. There’s no reason, I just tried to get something that rolled off the tounge, had a bit of mystique, and had atleast 12 pretenious points on the 34 Starbucks and Pitchfork scale. There’s a bit of a B story, with Ben Kweller and a pair of shoes, but mostly I wanted to be jive.
Sha sha, sha do.
I’ve considered switching over to the name I use in my Spanish class, but it is rather lengthy: Santa Anna de Salchicha. That name is so bad ass, that if Lee Van Cleef was a scratch and sniff plumberry Hello Kitty eraser, it would have to be a full on holographic nasal drip inducing caoutchouc Satan crotch-rot-birthed tub of bread crumbs.
I also have the name Cowboy Cowdung floating around somewhere, and that has an actual story. One time, I found a box that fries came in, or it was mine, or something, and I threw it down on my desk. I was Bauer, it was a terrorist, and I let my eraser do the Terrorist Tickling. It talked, and out came my hero, Cowboy Cowdung, and so I adopted the persona for a day or two, until he was lost or stolen or something.
Это русское слово «актёр»
It dates back to my days in high school and college when I was an actor and I studied Russian. I’ve done neither in about 8 years, so it’s just history.
Previous to adopting “aktep” I was known about cyberspace as “zyr”, a misspelling of the word “sir”, which had an interesting history involving the Prodigy message boards, the game Madmaze, and a desire to appear at the end of the user list. It also proved to be nicely unique for a while, then suddenly it mysteriously was not (and is even now the name of a vodka ) I got tired of explaining the name, and running into user name length limitations, and felt like I should ditch the name when it was not unique and did not reflect me in any way – it was just some nonsense word I came up with when I was 12.
BTW…FTR i got your nickname…85+/- shows and I met Mickey back stage once 
My name…I am poor and i will do anything legally and ethical for money…
ThisSpaceForRent…aka daniel
Mine’s my Star Wars ™ name. I use it for email addresses and on various because
- It’s me but it’s anonymous
- Ain’t no other Davmi LaSav’s out there. (Google’s wrong, btw. I’ve never even heard of Oatmeal, TX!)
- Hi, Opal! (Virgin usage!)
I always thought it was an homage to Joey Tribianni’s soap star character from Friends, Dr. Drake Ramoray!
I can be INCREDIBLY intelligent, combining many disparate things into a new cohesive whole that changes the world for the better…only to forget to use the right postage when sending it to the Patent Office.
While not members of the board, My twin boys are Bugglies. I can yell out “whose a buggly?” and I get two, in tune 'me!'s when I want to know where in the house they are…The name Grunting Buggly was taken from vogon poetry.
Like What Exit? and quite a few other Dopers, I’m a Tolkien junkie. Elendil was a great King of Men who valiantly fell in battle against the Dark Lord, Sauron. His many-greats-grandson Aragorn rose to become King of Gondor and Arnor in The Lord of the Rings. I admire both characters, and (were they not fictional) would be honored to be descended from them.
I like C S Lewis. In Out of the Silent Planet, Mars is inhabited and known by the locals as “Malacandra”. Its ruling “archangel” is known as Oyarsa while on that world, but elsewhere (where he is not top dog) he is himself known as “Malacandra”.
Because of the -a ending, people who are used to Latinate names frequently mistake my gender. And people sometimes think the “Mal-” phoneme is something to do with French or Latin. I’ve put a note in the Location field to try to overcome the former, but there’s not much I can do about the latter except smile and wave.
It’s sort of from Wicked.
when Wicked first came out, my voice teacher and lots of my dance class friends got the OBC recording and the book and such. I did too. They used to all tell me how much Elphaba reminded them of me. I even got to sing “I’m Not That Girl” at the studio show.
Since it’s one of my favorite shows, and since I really do identify with Elphaba a lot, my e-mail addres is Elphaba_SurrenderDorothy (just Elphaba was taken, obviously.)
I decided to take the Elphaba bit out for my SDMB name. It’s too damn long, it’s just a jumble of words, and it claims something about my personality that could very well change. Plus if I decide Wicked’s not my favorite musical after all in a few months (it seems impossible, but it’s happened before) Wizard of OZ will still definitely be one of my all-time favorite movies/books/musicals/etc.
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It’s also the world’s greatest piece of graffiti. I figured you were from Maryland.
Our family calls ourselves piggles after some character(s) in Pogo. My parents are Mr. and Mrs. Piggle or Mr. and Mrs. P.
My screen name is merely my initials; currently I am regretting not signing up as geegaw.
Meh, I signed up using my real name, and made the switch to my current when I decided to stick around for a while. It’s a nod to my heritage and to my drinking habits.
Scabpicker was both the title and the epithet hurled at the protragonist from the first song by a band I was in. It was rather popular, and we got sick of having to play it all the time, but it was a good song (nope, I did not wite it). I used it for the first email address I had that was not assigned to me, and well, everywhere else since. If you see Scabpicker, it is probably me.
I can’t say Scabpicker is a charachter I identify with, but it was just too easy to remember. When I use it as an email address, people forget the domain, but not the username.
Yeah, I really can’t leave a wound alone. So? They itch!
Ditto.
I picked my name since I am a HHTG fan. Ford’s character in the book is flippant, greedy, lazy, a crazy ass drunk, get as much for as little, yet does what he needs to do to save the galaxy, even if he does bitch about it the whole time. In other words, me in a nutshell. If that weren’t enough, he had me at “Fuck them” (in the fifth book.)
I’m a big fan of Dr. Seuss.
Old timers will recognize my screen name as a minor recurring character in Al Capp’s classic comic strip, “Li’l Abner.” Lonesome Polecat was a short, pot-bellied Indian who lived in a cave with his hillbilly buddy, Hairless Joe, where they brewed their famous brand of moonshine, Kickapoo Joy Juice.
It’s everything I’ve ever wanted out of life.
Mine’s a song from one of my favorite bands, Son Volt. I believe it’s off of the album Straightaways.
I’ve worked as a summertime gravedigger as well.
Ironically, I’d prefer that all graveyards be made into municipal golf courses.
-Cem