Some of you have interesting usernames. Why did you choose them? What do they mean?

When I returned to the US permanently after 18 years in Brazil, Portuguese syntax would sometimes creep into my spoken English, causing me like Yoda to sound; i.e. anastrophically.

And you, Hydra?

Backwards, almost, phonemically, my first name: /'dʒejmz/.

assuming that one thinks my handle is interesting, it's the old Linotype/English letter usage thang.

Shrdlu. MR. Shrdlu.

That's interesting. Thanks for sharing.

Me, I just think Hydras are cool.

Oh jim, could you not just have made it "mij ", I always break my neck over your zmjehd name. Furthermore it would have meant
"me" in Indo Germanic Dutch. So much easier.
I mean you would be you of course.

"mij ",

I subvocalize zmjezhd as Midge. I like your reconstructed Indo Tectonic Daytsh theory better, though.

In case it is interesting albeit unoriginal, just thought it had some nostalgic panache. Also seem to recall one poster fancying that perfume.

it's in the fine print

-joe (atman) friday

Bran+Shea:two from A Song of Ice and Fire. Soon coming up as an
HBO serial. History-ish Science fiction. Pre or Early medieval.

I wonder where Jackie's name comes from.

as Canucks we say Zed rather than Zee.


(well that's part of it. The other reason that I don't intend to admit to is that as a nerdy kid - geeks had not been invented yet - I had an adventurous, imaginary other-self similar to Calvin's Spaceman Spiff. Mine was named Zedael just because I liked the way it sounded. But like I said, I don't tell people about that so Shhhhh.)

for a game played on long car trips when my kids were young..

"what would your vanity plate be?" (most states require 7 or fewer letters/numbers).

when i first got a home email account in the 1980's, my first email wad from my son who had written a bit of code searching for of troy as an email name, and had found my email before i told him the address. he felt certain i would take of troy as an email name. (and i did)

I initially took Zmjezhd to be some inflected form of the Russian Змей, dragon, serpent.

The simple explanation for Faldage is that is the right of the lord of the manor to have his tenants pasture their sheep where he tells them to, the purpose being to fertilize the ground with the sheep droppings. That, however, has little to do with why I chose it. It was a name I used before I ever dreamed of having a screen name.

But how do you pronounce tswum? Or tsuwwftdm?

tsuwm himself has other ideas about the matter but I've always ponounced it just the way it's spelled, tsuwm.

I've always ponounced it just the way it's spelled

Me, I've always pronounced it to rhyme with voom, i.e., the sound a Norwegian Blue makes after he's nuzzled up to those bars and bent 'em apart with his beak.

I got this nickname from the title of a book by L. Sprague DeCamp. It's not high literature. It's pretty trashy, in fact, but I was instantly enamoured with the main character, Zdim, from the first time I read the book more than 25 years ago. In fact, my nickname back in those days was zdim, and people who talked to me back in the earlier days of the Internet would have spoken to me as that alias.

The book is about this reptilian creature from the twelfth dimension who gets brought to our reality by a magician. He's a creature of pure logic who has a few adventures while trying to carry out the instructions given to him by his foolish and evil master.

Also it hints at philosophical and personal fallibilism.

lovely plumage, the Norwegian Blue.

"VOOM"?!? Mate, this bird wouldn't "voom" if you put four million volts through it! 'E's bleedin' demised!

it's 'SUE-əm, sorta rhyming with voom in a schwad way, and the T as in tsar or tsunami.

-joe ('E's pining!) friday

and the T as in tsar or tsunami

So, if you pronounce the ts in those words, it's okay in your moniker, right?

- The Man (Midge) Who Was Thursday

gotta like it.

dalehileman is one who lives in a valley and has curative abilities

Etaoin Shrdlu, at last got behind the source of your name. Surprising and a nice machine on wikipedia but I guess it would be impolite to ask for the how and why of the choice.

>>

obviously, there are more obvious monikers.

-ron obvious

damn! wish I had chosen monica.

anyway, I just have always liked the whole etaoin shrdlu thing. it is also, apocryphally, the order of most usage in English, so throw the printing thing in with that, and it's just fun.

I was actually surprised that it hadn't been taken when I joined here.

that's all.

E...S
T...H
A...R
O...D
I... L
N...U

Like this. and thanks for sharing.

We did this thread waaaaaay back when... most people guessed Wise Old Woman. Nuh uh. Just turn it upside down

I remember you saying this in a thread about anagrams, acronyms and acrostichons. Nice to meet you again.
You mean to say that a wise old woman and a mom can not be one and the same person? Are you not?
How should I understand this? Sorry, I guess I misunderstood at first.(like often)
You did all this before, maybe more than once.

>You did all this before, maybe more than once.

oh yeah, this is a YART several times over. I tried to find the original, but it seems to be lost in the mists — not even the Wayback Machine could come up with it. (I did find the acronym acrostic thread, but that had a certain je ne sais quoi...)

-joe (honi soit qui mal y pense) friday

What's that? A vertical palindrome?

What's that? A vertical palindrome?

No, it's Dutch for acrostic. It's interesting how the sound went from Greek [kʰ] to French [ʃ] to English [k̚] influenced by spelling. English acrostic > Greek akros 'head' + stikhos 'line (of verse); row' (cf. stichometry 'counting lines of poetry').

Thanks for explaining 'dʒejmz.

I know it's bad habit Hydra, sometimes I just think in Dutch.

So then what do you call a word (like mom/wow) that reads upside-down?

I know such words exist in Chinese. I imagine there are very few in English.

Other than, say, one, two, three, river, sun and mouth, which, when turned upside down, are respectively one, two, three, river, sun and mouth, at least in single hanzi form* I would tend to doubt it.

*I'm not sure that single hanzi form is valid for any word in Chinese. Well, maybe for one, two and three.

I don't call it anything.The word is WOW. Turned upside down I'm willing to understand MOM, but in the meantime the W's are still W's. Upturned W's will never become M's. If I want to be nitpickitytoo.

Here is: Palindrome

Here is: Etaoin Shrdlu

Here is: Written Chinese is unusual in being the only major modern-day writing system not based predominantly on an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Instead, Chinese characters are symbols/glyphs whose parts may depict objects or represent abstract notions.'
(a person standing on his head may look like an upturned glyph.)
I'll ask Jennifer from Shenyang about upside down glyphs.
Many peoplia upsidownia. Some artist wrote or painted that.

panache?

Well, it has a name.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambigram

And you're right, Faldage. Ambigrams exist in Korean, not Chinese. One example: The word door, turned upside-down, becomes bear.

I wonder where Jackie's name comes from. My parents.

zhmzed, you don't want to know how I pronounce your screen name to myself...

Aramis, come here a minute--I have something for you.

sue-em, here's the first thread; thought I remembered Anna wanting to know about peoples' handles.

That was a fun re-read, Jackie -- thanks for finding it.

Nice to read the OldTimers.

Aside from the obvious pecuniary reference, Pennyless comes from my maiden name, Penny Lesser. (In my high school Latin class, we each made up Latin names for ourselves. Mine was Mina Minor.)

I suspect I don't want it.

Hee, hee!

Anna--you're welcome!

After reading this entire thread, I am (almost) embarrassed to contribute.
My last name is Parkin and my first name is Thom

Of course, being an Internet-phite since the earliest days, I have this username (and associated email address) in many, many places. Nowadays it is a 'badge of honor' to have an email address with your name in it that does not include numbers!

I'm not too sure as to when Oliver became Olly for me. Somewhere in my single digit years the transformation was instigated by my schoolmates. My mother and my Two girls call me Oliver, as does my sister and her kids. My wife calls me OLIVER on certain higher frequency occassions. My preferred spelling is Olly, but I am also Oli, Ollie, Oly, Olay, Ole, anymore out there?