As a Lithuanian that has grown up in the UK I have had many many many different nicknames, due to the difficulty that English people had in pronouncing my name. (Mindaugas)
When I was 9 years old a kid in chess club called me Minty, and it stuck so that is what everybody in life now calls me.
When I was first making my Runescape account in 2005 when I was 10 years old Minty was taken, I tried Mintyboy, Also taken. So I added 4 as I was born in the year of 1994 and so Mintyboy4 was born on the internet.
Not that anybody really cares as I am not yet an influencial player on this site.

@minty: great post until the last sentence. I don't care about influential players, I care about interesting stories. And yours counts as much as anyone's.

I sometimes wish that my name had a slightly less obscure reference. But by way of explanation, here's a definition of "pale" that I post on my Webdip homepage: "Pale: a palisade of stakes : an enclosing barrier : a restraining boundary : DEFENSE 2 a : a pointed stake driven into the ground in forming a palisade or fence b : a slat fastened to a nail at top and bottom for fencing : PICKET 3 a : a space or field having bounds : an enclosed or limited region or place : ENCLOSURE b : a territory or district within certain bounds or under a particular jurisdiction 4 : an area (as of conduct) within which one is privileged or protected esp. by custom (as from censure or retaliation) <conduct that was beyond the ~> 5 a obs : a vertical stripe (as on a coat) b : a perpendicular stripe in an escutcheon ".

I sometimes wish that I'd gone for a simpler reference...which brings me to the question: do mods ever allow a name change? The sense I have is that they never do. But why not allow players to change their name once a year? The mods could post the once yearly name changes on the forum for all to see. It would be a fun twist to this site...

Yellowjacket... I dunno. It suits my personality I guess.

Mine is just my Halo Combat Evolved (gosh, I feel old saying that now) nickname. When my friend Brian killed me with a rocket launcher and said, "Gees, guess you been sent airborne!" airborne17th is the one I used much more often as it is my xbox and steam name.

I was listening to the Kazakh instrumental trio Ulytau when I was filling out the registration info for webDip.

Few years later, I still sport a name that sets me apart from local hordes of Anglofags. Another job well done.

That's really a coincidence, ulytau. I was also listening to this Kazakh instrumental trio when I was filling out the registration info, but I was in a red house and it was 1938 at the time.

They're not bad, actually.

I don't listen bad Kazakh instrumental trios.

I can to bed grammer tho.

Arameic Te'oma-twin and norse Olafr-forefathers descendant (son of the father)

Who doesn't like to talk about themself?

I'm a Maniac, a Maniac on the floor

nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more

my name my name
means means
that i that i
was both was both
a star wars fan a star wars fan
and repetitive and repetitive
when i when i
joined this site joined this site.

(now though, now though,
i am only i am only
ONE OF THESE THINGS ONE OF THESE THINGS!)

;) ;)

i wonder how many of these are legit accounts of genuine people. i somehow get the feeling some of these are just someone pretending to be a charicature (however that is spelled) rather than their real personality.

I am late to this thread but as a philologist, historical linguist and German-speaker, I read the @abgemacht bits with amusement. That term actually made it directly into English as a cognate, which has wonderfully ambiguous usage ... especially with respect to Diplomacy. The English word is "made up", which has two primary meanings:

"Reconciled" (or "agreed") as in "Redhouse made up with his girlfriend after suggesting on an internet forum that he might ask somebody else to marry him."

or

"Invented" as in "Abge made up an alliance with Germany in order to convince England to vacate STP".

So be careful.

[grammar]
And now that I am started, consider how little "up-ness" is involved in "to make up". That is precisely because it comes from the German "ab-machen", with "up" being the English variant of "ab" (which has nothing to do with "up", but rather means from, away from, or ... in the case of mountain climbing, for instance, _down_ from).

This also explains why "up" is not a preposition here, but part of the verb. (If it were a preposition, what is it's object?) And how would you reword a sentence such as "I made it up" in order to avoid ending it with a "preposition"? "It is a thing up which I made." ?? Any better ideas? Even more convoluted than the oft-quoted "Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put."
[/grammar]

Carry on.

Another definition of 'made-up' is "one who has applied his/her make-up". I think this is what it really means, but I'm not going to cast any more dispersions as I'm in a game with him/her.

:)

Actually I thought of other things reading 'abgemacht'. I thought it was related to the Dutch 'afmaken'; i.e.: 'afgemaakt'. Tho this can be read in the same meaning, as 'finished', in Dutch it can also mean 'killed', 'slaughtered', 'murdered'. So I had some darker interpretations...


As for my username, it started out as Ursa_Maior, which is of course a reference to the constellation of Ursa Maior or the Great Bear. This is what I aspire to be, and I am already very fuzzy and like to sleep a lot. In time it became shortened to Ursa, which at some point became a nickname and the username I use on the interwebs if possible.

A closely guarded secret is that Ursa actually means 'female bear' in Latin, while I am, in fact, male.

My name: last name, first initial. S. Heck.

@virtualbob: "Invented" as in "Abge made up an alliance with Germany in order to convince England to vacate STP".


Please don't talk about ongoing games in the forum ;-)

And thanks for that explanation. I'm still kicking myself for being hooked for so many responses, without googling it. But I'm sure it was more fun for abgemacht that way, knowing I just wasn't getting it, despite his repeated attempts to clue me in.

I've always enjoyed linguistics, etymology and the like. Historical linguist sounds like it would be a cool profession. I'm curious though, what does a historical linguist actually do as a day to day job? Is it research, or is there a practical side to it?

Hobby at this point. Helps when I read medieval chronicles or old Norse sagas. (seriously). Day job is language technology strategist - creative usage of machine translation and large scale inter-company workflow optimization for the translation and big data analytics industries.

cteno4: shortened version of ctenophore, "comb-bearer," or comb jelly (a phylum of marine invertebrate). I have fond memories of a rowboat trip across Friday Harbor that involved a chance encounter with one on our way to a contra dance. <3

Google "The Hanged Man" and take your pick of interpretations.

Naw, blankflag, Just turn the RL me into a moderate sociopath, and you get YJ. Basically the same guy.

My initials are JBK, and my first email address I made was [email protected] in late '99 when I was 10. I rolled with it.

Early in my internet career, I signed up for a message board with my e-mail address public (using my work e-mail address) and when the name I initially had chosen turned out to already exist I decided to add a number to the end. Being unimaginative and at work, I chose my work extension as that number.

During this era, I ended up with a creepy internet stalker who would do things like send me naked pictures of herself. To my work address. Oh, and she was underage. I decided that she would eventually figure out what my random number was, and already having the name of my business, I could only imagine how crippling that could be professionally. So I made up a story for wide release that it was an important number to me in a numerological fashion and that I lived my life in supplication to that number. This phenomenon became known as the "Sacred Digits." Eventually, most of my friends online referred to me as that, even if my display name was still the old name.

I realized Sacred Digits sounded better than the unoriginal name that required the use of said digits, so I've stuck with it.

@Obi, I always read your name as Obiwan-Nobiwan. I always figured there was some weird reference in there that I was missing. Odd.