There’s a classic ASCII-art PC game called Castle Adventure(Ah, memories!). For some reason, it was retitled “Golden Wombat” at one point. There aren’t any wombats in the game.
All of this arises from a lesser corollary of the Spooch Theorem: The word “wombat” is intrinsically funny.
This is due to its structure and the cognitive dissonance arising from the inclusion of a word for a flying mammal in a word for a flightless mammal. Therefore, the humor value of text or speech can often be increased by the inclusion of the word “wombat”.
Back in my college days, a linguistics class I was taking had us make up a word. I “invented” sherdlhu - a rare form of purple Mongolian snub-nosed wombat.
Wombats (the word and the animal) show up in a couple of Monty Python sketches. It was the name of the poet inspector (“Wombat Harness”), and they also showed up in “News for Wombats”.
Prior to Monty Python, John Cleese performed in I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again on the radio. Some of the episodes in Series 3 had a radio serial called “The Curse of the Flying Wombat”.
It’s a pretty boring explanation, really. When I first signed up for the SDMB, I noticed the culture of anonymity, so I figured I’d use a nickname (this was unusual for me–I generally believe that if it’s worth saying, it’s worth putting my name on).
I’ve only had three nicknames in my life. One was “Fang” (don’t ask), one was “Groundhog” (I don’t even know where they got that one), and the other was “Invisible Wombat.” It came from an “in joke” in my high school involving animals not being allowed on school grounds. In protest, we brought invisible pets. Mine was a wombat.
Recently, after becoming a moderator, I decided to switch over to using my real name, but I thought it could be confusing in old threads where I was quoted. That’s why I kept the “Wombat” in my username – although I dropped the “Invisible” because it made the name unwieldy.
Once everyone gets used to me being Gary instead of Wombat, I’ll probably drop the Wombat entirely.
That explains why there’s a Wombat moderator, anyway.
