What's the meaning behind your SDMB user name?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Hi all…as you can see I’m pretty new to posting although I lurk all the dang time :slight_smile: . My apologies if this has been done already recently, I haven’t seen it and I don’t want to stress the hamsters by running a search…

What’s the meaning behind your SDMB user name, if you don’t mind sharing? Some of you have really interesting user names and I’d love to hear the stories behind them.

I guess I should start. “hill” is a shortened form of my first name, and although my mother tried to give me a first name that wouldn’t lend itself to nicknames, all through high school and college people called me “hill”. Various other nicknames followed, one of which was “hill o beans”. It was the first one that came to mind when I was registering for SDMB.

How about you?

hill

2

5-ht = 5-Hydroxytryptamine, the chemical name of Serotonin. I picked it in college because I was studying pharmacology and used it here because I couldn’t think of anything else and I was reasonably sure no one else would have it.

3

Hi, hill! And a belated welcome to the boards. It has been done, but some time ago. We can all appreciate sparing the hamsters any unnecessary wear and tear.

My user name is easy. I live in the desert (and hate it), and I’m a geezer (61 next month). Anyway, I couldn’t think of anything clever.

4

The mystery of my username is ancient and dark. Many a Doper have tried long and hard to find the meaning of my username. The perils that they faced to do so have been terrifying and bone-chilling. Over mountains and deserts, through forests, ravines and swamps, across oceans and unforgiving tundra they went in search of the secret of my username. Some are said to be still out there searching, looking, wandering in the wilderness for some clue as to the meaning of my name. But I’ll never tell… Bwa hahahahahaha. :smiley:

Zev Steinhardt

5

Mine is pretty simple. I am a dreaded and terrible Great Old One, who, when The Stars Are Right will rise from the depths of R’lyeh and devour humanity.

6

I almost hate to post this, because every time I do it seems to be a threadkiller. That’s not my intent. I don’t want to ruin the fun. I love this stuff. Obviously this thread pops up frequently, so I sort of keep track of them to save Dopers the effort of re-entering their username explanations. If a lot of people reply to this OP, then this thread too will get added to the list.

If you have hours to kill, here are a number of threads dedicated to the topic of the meaning or origin of the Usernames selected by the Teeming Millions[sup]TM[/sup]… as follows…

[WARNING: Do NOT post to any of these old threads!!!]

How did you chose your username? (8-18-2000, 2 pages)

What does your Straight Dope nickname mean? (12-2-2000, 4 pages.)

Where’d you get your board name? (1-2-2001, 3 pages.)

Stupid User Names (1-6-2001, 3 pages)

What’s the story behind your username? (4-26-2001, 2 pages)

Your Literary Straight Dope Handle (8-5-2001, 2 pages.)

What does your name mean? (9-6-2001, 2 pages)

SDMB usernames - What’s the first thing you think of? (7-15-2002, 3 pages)

The “What’s the deal with your username?” Thread (7-16-2002, 3 pages)

Explain what your name means, and what you think we think it means (7-25-2002, 2 pages)

Explain your username! (1-23-2003, 5 pages)

Screen name significance? (3-28-2003, 2 pages)

So how did you pick your username? (5-26-2003, 3 pages)

Also, for fun, Doper [categorizing] Name Game (11-4-2001, 7 pages)
and similarly Have you noticed how much Evil… (more categorizing) (7-20-2003, 4 pages)

And, here is a recent thread about Doper name changes. Official Recordation of Name Change Thread

7

Mine is from a painfully misspelled attempt at my last name from a letter I got years ago.

I loved it because it’s ironic; I’m widely regarded as genial and even-tempered as they come.

8

“I don’t want to ruin the fun” (but I will, and I have before).

Sort of like the guy who says “No offense, but…” and proceeds to say something offensive. Why don’t you just go away? There are a lot of new people on the boards, and many of us older ones who don’t mind revisiting an old thought. Anyway, your first three or so links were pre-crash and are not available anymore.

9

“bluecanary in the outlet by the light switch, who watches over you”

(They Might Be Giants)

10

Nothing too clever or earth-shattering, I’m afraid! My birthday’s in May and I thought it sounded nice!

11

Fair enough. Usually I don’t post my links until the thread has pretty much run its course, though as I pointed out, I have niggling doubts. This time, part of it is an experiment to see if this really inhibits responses. If so, then perhaps you’re right and I shouldn’t post these links. I’d like to hear the opinion of other Dopers. What do you think?

Not true. All the links are active and available. The only links lost were those that occurred during the Winter of our Missed Content, and I have none of those on my list.

12

My username means that I am more dense than anything in the known universe. :slight_smile:

13

I have no clue.

[here are some flowers for algernon. I thought it was a good idea, but hey! look at my name]

14

I used to be *bean_shadow, but changed my name to the one you see before you. The new one is from a They Might Be Giants Song called “Rabid Child” about a young girl who talks to truckers on her CB radio. Her handle is Rabid Child. She also makes a cameo appearance, very very shortly, in another TMBG’s song called “Hey Mr. DJ, I Thought You Said We Had a Deal”.

*My other screen name came from the character of “Bean” in the Orson Scott Card book “Ender’s Shadow”.

15

Thanks for the flowers and the laugh NoClueBoy. Maybe I should be NoClueOldMan.

16

Magayuk means The Howler, and I thout it was appropriate. (both because I have sled dogs, and because I have a big mouth)

17

Turns out you are right. I tried the first three links the first time and I got an “unable to display this page” message. But I tried the earliest one again just now and it came right up. Must have been a glitch in my browser the first time.

Also, it seems you haven’t killed this thread. I seem to have over estimated your destructive powers. :smiley:

18

I think I’ve told the story of my username before in one of the linked threads but I need to kill ten minutes before I leave work and writing it out again will make me sound busy (I have a loud clacky keyboard) so here goes…

At my last job there were two of us named Josh. We sat in adjecant cubicals and worked on a major project together. People were always calling for a Josh and getting the wrong one, or callling our name across cube land and interrupting both of us when only one Josh was needed. One day just got fed up with it, stood up at my cubical and announced that from that moment forward I would be known as “The Funky Space Cowboy.” Then I emailed that announcment to the customer whose project the Josh’s worked on and told them my new name. Everyone got a good laugh out of and much to my surprise the nickname stuck. Whenever there was a chance of causing Josh confusion they called me FunkySpaceCowboy and my colleauge Josh.

I liked the nickname so much that I decided to switch all of my various and sundry internet handles to it as well, when I finally got around to signing up for the SDMB it was already my establed handle. So there ya go, the mystery of the Funky Space Cowboy revealed :slight_smile:

What’s kinda funny is that since creating that nickname I’ve moved to Houston, TX, where actual spacecowboys (astronaughts) work and train. Of course I’m not one of them. :slight_smile:

19

When i joined SDMB, it was my first online message board. I didn’t realize that my username was going to be the handle that identified me for the duration of my stay, so i just took the first letter from my first name (m) and added it to an abbreviated and slightly altered version of my last (hendo).

If i had known that this would lead to my permanent board name being “mhendo,” it would have gone with just “hendo,” because that is what i was called at school.

20

Rooves is how the plural of roof sounds in a Pink Floyd song. There’s a part that goes " The rain fell slow down on all the roofs of uncertainty…I thought of you and the years of all the sadness fell away from me". It fits me.