Username

[eirias]

It occurred to me that one of the mildly interesting questions to ask on LJ is, where did your username come from, and why did you pick it?

My username is a Welsh word meaning something like "blazing." It was the name of an important sword in one of my favorite series of books as a child/young adult, The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper. My first MUD character was named Eirias. She was a redheaded fairy and pretty insignificant at everything. Some years later, I had this name registered on a couple of IRC servers (though I expect it's expired by now), so when I got an LJ mostly for the purpose of stalking people I chatted with on IRC, it was the natural name to choose. However, eleven years later I'm still not positive how it ought to be pronounced. I say "EE-ree-us" in my head, but my recently-acquired rudimentary knowledge of Welsh suggests the accent should be on the second syllable, and I have no idea about Welsh vowel space...

Readers, some of you have pretty obvious names, but with others of you I am lost. I am particularly curious about the origins/personal significance of corydoras, darlox, elwe, nonnihil, sagittalbreast, and upsilon, all of which are opaque to me. But everyone is invited to respond :).

Comments

[madmanatw.livejournal.com]

You probably know mine. :)

I've always pronounced your username (and the sword) "Err RI us".

(For those who may be reading without knowing the story of mine, it's from the Elton John song 'Madman Across the Water'. I used it in my "real name" field on my college unix account for a while, when fooling with those was the Thing To Do. Unlike the dozen or so names I had gone through before it, that one stuck.)

[roamin-umpire.livejournal.com]

*nod* Mine similarly comes from the days that I cycled through "real names" on a Unix server. This one stuck because it had a few things going for it in addition to the "Roman Empire" pun:
-- At the time, I was a baseball umpire. Now I work football and lacrosse, both of which have umpire positions, so it still works. (Even though I'm usually NOT the umpire in these sports.)
-- At the time, I had this habit of showing up in unlikely places completely unannounced. I still like to drive new places.
-- Nationality-wise, I'm more Italian than anything else - hence, "Roman."
-- I'd lay claim to being an empire unto myself, completing the pun, but I don't think anyone would by it. :)

[friedenliebe.livejournal.com]

I always pronounce it wronger....

err RI uh sis

[dancingwaves.livejournal.com]

This actually was *not* my first LJ (that was spiritedwriter), thouugh this is the name that stuck ... it's from a line in "Always" by Jonatha Brooke (part of the lyrics can be found on my profile (http://dancingwaves.livejournal.com/profile)). The song is absolutely beautiful and Brooke said that the song is also based on the ideas of A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf. The connection to feminism has also helped it stick.

I also am a big fan of water, and so, the waves part just sort of feels like home. And it's not that I dance, so much ... but the vision of waves dancing, swirling, etc. .. I like it.

Plus, there are lots of fun connections with water/oceans that I've found since then (like the Ellis quote on my profile page as well).

:)

[leora.livejournal.com]

You might already know this, but mine is my name. Well, one of them - I have many names. But this one is one of the ones I was given during my official naming ceremony and whatnot on August 11, 1977. As it doesn't get much use, it seemed time to give it a chance to be used a bit more.

[(Anonymous)]

Somehow I managed not to know that. I assume it is a Hebrew name and I don't think I knew those!

That is an *adorable* picture of you, btw.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Er, that was me :).

[leora.livejournal.com]

Yup, my Hebrew Middle name. Also somewhat close to a family name, my ancestress Leanora. I had actually meant to use the younger me userpic, which is less cute, but closer in age to when I was named. I don't have a lot of pictures of me scanned in, so my selections are few.

Adorable is an odd term to use for a picture of me. Nobody found me adorable, or generally even cute, when I was a child. But as an adult, some of my pictures have elicited such comments. I actually did have a cute phase at about age 7, I think. But it was brief. But I do like that shot, because it is somewhat a decent picture to capture me. This one is a bit lesso. It's my fourth birthday, and the picture quality is poor.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

No, that's totally an adorable picture of you. It was one of the first words that sprang to my mind too :).

And, oddly, it is more adorable than the childhood picture, although the childhood one is orange, which isn't helping.

[leora.livejournal.com]

Well, they're both childhood. One's just early childhood and the other mid-childhood.

I am vaguely tempted to want to do a study of ranking cuteness and see if geeks have a statistically significant variance even for preferences in what kids look like.

On a side note, in both of those pictures, I was already wearing glasses at pretty much all waking times. But my father insisted I take my glasses off for almost all pictures, so there are very few pictures of me in my glasses as a child, even though I wore them constantly and got them somewhere between my third and fourth birthday.

I also probably will generally look silly in any picture where I am attempting to smile. I was a good child and, at first, tried to smile when told to. But I really didn't get smiling, so it was always stupid, and I was always grumpy about being told to smile, and most of the pictures were "I'm going to take a picture" sort of pictures.

[tiurin.livejournal.com]

And yet, one can imagine a speech bubble coming out of that picture going "I released ebola into my preschool building today!"

[leora.livejournal.com]

LOL. No, but at the time, I did think most of my peers were insane.

[roamin-umpire.livejournal.com]

*blink* And once again I am made aware of the transformative power of eyewear upon appearance.

And, yes, this is definitely an adorable picture. (They both are, really, but this one especially.)

[leora.livejournal.com]

It's almost certainly not just the eyewear. I'm about 9 years old, which means that I would naturally look different and also means that it's before my nose was broken, which did change my appearance quite a bit. Glasses, nowadays, help to make my face look more normal, by distracting from the evidence of the break, but without glasses, it becomes far more obvious. So, many people didn't pick up on the problem until I stopped wearing glasses (many people meaning family who have known me all my life), but it's there whether people notice consciously or not. But that is what I looked like when both younger and unbroken.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

I *love* your nose. I think it is an excellent nose.

Also, I am betting that part of why your friends think the older picture is so adorable is that in that one, you really do look like a smaller you, and all your personality is there, and it's like I want to go back and hug the tiny leora. In the really young picture, though, it doesn't connect that it's you -- I mean, cute kid, sure, whatever, but it's hard to identify that face with the larch we love :).

And -- am I right in reading the above to mean that you don't wear glasses anymore? I guess maybe they would be superfluous?

[leora.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I do feel the midling age pic is much more like me than the other one. The 4 year old one was me caught by surprise. We'd just gotten out of the pool at camp, and my family came by with a cake. I wasn't expecting to see them at camp. Although I was expecting cake to be present at some point during my birthday. But the face also doesn't really look much like me... kids, they look weird. The older one is more me being me.

As to glasses... ummm yes and no. I stopped wearing them when I went blind, not because they were superfluous, but because they were giving me migraines - every single day. They did improve my vision, but not enough to make a huge difference in what I could do, and what I can do with poor vision and no migraine is much, much more than what I can do with migraines every day. Now, I once again have glasses, and in theory they may even make me able to see. In practice... well, my vision is definitely improved by them (the hope is that they would bring me up to 20/100 in the left eye). But... I am still getting headaches from them. I don't know if they will go away if I keep wearing them, so I wear them intermittently. I just took them off, to give my eyes a rest for a while and intend to use my computer without them. Plus, for some reason I don't understand, several visual tasks are far, far harder with them. The day I got them, I was totally unable to navigate independently with them on. I needed my lothario to walk me anywhere, because I just couldn't manage. It was really strange. I couldn't have crossed a street safely on my own, but without them, I could easily do that. I still have huge problems going down staircases with them on. I have to slow to a crawl, take each step separately, and it's still scary, disorienting, and just plain hard. But without them, I can walk steps normally when my legs aren't giving me problems.

So, I am kinda wearing glasses, but sometimes I think it'd be easier if I'd just never gotten a pair.

[nonnihil.livejournal.com]

Nonnihil is Latin for "somewhat." I chose it because, being a latecomer to this LJ thing, I found all the the other ones I had tried were already taken. But the reason it came to mind --

I am not in general a devotee of the notion that one can understand a culture through its language; a sort of linguistic version of graphology, it seems to work best when you already know the answers in advance. Nonetheless, nonnihil has always seemed to me to bound Latin and the Romans in a nutshell.

The Latin language seems at times like an exercise in minimalism. Half the words on closer examination turn out to be retooled from other words; practically every word can be swapped from one part of speech to another to another, each step accomplishable half a dozen ways. Spend long and you start to feel like all there is are a few hundred words bounced and tumbled for centuries, stitched together again and again, building a language from the barest building blocks. Follow the consonant shifts and there even fewer down there.

What is left at the bottom? Strength, motion, union, negation, absence, light, hands, bearing, atoms of expression hungry for the chemistry of language. (Is it any surprise, really, that they only had a couple of dozen names among them? Any more would have been vanity in the face of the words). Nonnihil -- non nihil -- not nothing and not a hair's-breadth more. And there is Rome, in all its unsentimental, parsimonious, closed-mouthed glory, knitting together a language of clumsy generalities into a weird little haiku of precision and nuance. It was a cruel, bladed language that tortured brilliance from its orators, turned its poets into addicts, and ate religions whole.

That's not nothing.

[knell.livejournal.com]

My current one is obvious, but my former username, firmbutfair, takes a little bit of explanation. Normally I don't do the pseudonym thing - my life on the Internet dates back to when you'd generally say things under your real name or not at all (and even if you didn't, everyone knew who you were anyway), so just about everywhere I'm Mike or mpk or whatever (although address me as "mpk" in person and I shall look bewildered, as I have a perfectly usable first name).

I came late to Livejournal, mostly in order to have an account and thus be able to nose at my friends' friends-locked stuff, and all the obvious choices were taken. I thought for a moment about my style of arguing (generally, when people are giving out my response will be firm, but fair) and chose firmbutfair. About 10 seconds later I started regretting it for the obvious implications involved as, well, though plenty of people are into That Kind Of Thing I'm not. So eventually, when I noticed that knell was grabbable, I grabbed.

[knell.livejournal.com]

Oops - it updated my username with my new one, thus making that nonsensical. My old username was, of course, firmbutfair.

[kirin]

A Kirin, as you may already know, is an Asian mythological critter that generally gets described as a cross between a unicorn, a giraffe, and, uh.. something furry. (The extra "n" is due to the correct spelling being taken.) It's been my default online handle since I left the world of local BBS's around 1994 for the larger internet and discovered that my older handle, "Bahamut", was pretty much always taken, and also kind of pretentious (er, in certain circles).

No particularly profound reason behind it other than I'm interested in Asian cultures, I like the critter, and they show up in a lot of games and shows I've enjoyed. The one drawback of it is that in certain venues I get mistaken for bing named after beer. Ah well.

[kirin]

Oh, and I forgot to mention, I've always mentally pronounced your handle "Ey-ree-us", out of a general tendency to pronounce unknown words with all their vowels in the classical mode, i.e. "eh-ii-r-ii-ah-s", and then run it together a bit. This is almost certainly because most of the foreign languages I've been significantly exposed to (Latin, Italian, Japanese) work more or less that way. (German's different, I started learning bits of it much later.)

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

"Lyonesse" is pronounced "LEE-oh-ness" and is the name of a mythical city, to which mordred fled with his armies and which merlin sunk in the sea. you can (mythologically) hear the city's bells ringing if you sail off the coast of cornwall.

it's also a pun on "lioness", female lion, which i emphasize with my default user icon.

it was one of my backup irc nicks, available on dalnet when i happened to start this lj at the behest of an irc friend.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

And here I always assumed it was because of your mane! :)

Although of course female lions don't have manes. Nor did I even recognize that lioness as such -- I saw a wolf, somehow (maybe your novel led me astray).

[ex-miang438.livejournal.com]

If you're ever thoroughly bored, I went into an exceptionally long explanation (http://miang.livejournal.com/267514.html) back when I renamed my LJ account. Miang (whose in-game portrait is pictured in my user icon) is a particularly important plot character in Xenogears, but it's hard to say more without spoiling the entire game. I love her lots, though. :D

[evil-fizz.livejournal.com]

Mine's a joking references to being the evil twin (although my sister eventually opted for Fashionably Evil for LJ). Fizz is just something my family calls me as a corruption of Liz. Depending on the day, I'm also Fizzle, Fuzz, and Fuzzle, although I think I'd be disconcerted if anyone else ever called me such things.

[friedenliebe.livejournal.com]

email sn at the time (friedenliebe@freipost.de - later bought and made into friedenliebe@hotmail.com)

friedenliebe was also my D&D character by then

means peacelove, I was a hippy-lent middle schooler. Also the root of Sarahpeaceeliz.

that email, oddly enough, defunked last week.

hello LJ convergence

[ex-miang438.livejournal.com]

Whoa, I had no idea you and eirias knew each other! Small world.

Re: hello LJ convergence

[eirias.livejournal.com]

How do *you* guys know each other?
She and I are fraternity brothers :).

Re: hello LJ convergence

[ex-miang438.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure we've ever met directly, come to think of it, but we have a lot of friends in common as I'm good friends now with a bunch of people she knew from high school (and WCATY, I presume). :D They've mentioned her in conversation, though I mostly recognize her through comments in their journals.

Re: hello LJ convergence

[friedenliebe.livejournal.com]

she's my frat brother!

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

It's from The Dark is Rising?!? Huh, wonder why I never recognized it! Fabulous book that I read several times growing up.

Um, my name is because the first couple things I tried were all taken, so I started trying out random words, and this was the first one available. I do own a ukelele and know a little about playing it, but that happened purely coincidentally and later.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Well, it's from the series; I think it may actually be from one of the last two books, The Grey King and Silver on the Tree. :)

And yes, I remember the non-story of your name and its post-hoc justification. :) But probably other people don't know!

[upsilon.livejournal.com]

When I was in college, I partook in a briefly-run role-playing game in which I, floundering around for a character name, grabbed at a random letter of the Greek alphabet. It's not a well-known letter because it's not used for much in the major sciences (not like alpha, beta, gamma, pi, sigma or omega), so lots of folks don't recognize it as such. It worked in the RPG context, too.

Years later when I started this LJ I had a strong desire to be anonymous. Or relatively so. I still prefer that to be the case -- ideally, if you don't know me and I have not "friended" you, you can't figure out who I am. That's probably not quite the case, but it's my ideal.

Again, floundering around for a username, I seized on the same Greek letter. It's not meant to be particularly connected to the RPG, but it is interesting (to me at least) that I used the same letter... Those are the only contexts (I think) in which I have used the name "upsilon".

[darlox.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid I cannot wow you with a florid tale of deep and personal meaning. Something like a billion years ago when I first got on teh Interweb (around about 1991) there was a MUCK hosted out of Rutgers called Nails that I started playing compulsively. Having never been asked to choose a screen name for anything before, I thumbed through the nearest game book at hand and picked Darlok -- the name of an alien species in some cheesy PC game I was also addicted to at the time.

I used that handle for years and years until I encountered some system where that name was already taken. I can't even remember which. In desperation, and laziness, and hatred of appending numerals to names, I tried Darlox and it stuck.

For some reason I just never went back to my original handle, and have used this one for new systems ever since!

So, it's a bastardization of a name randomly pulled out of a game manual some 15 years ago. ;)

Cory cats

[corydoras.livejournal.com]

Corydoras is part of scientific name (the genus) of an adorable miniature South American fish. (Not the one in my userpic, that's a betta!) I once had a finned friend named Aureliano Jose ("el Jefe"), who was of the species corydoras agassizi (http://www.aqua-fish.net/show.php?what=fish&cur_lang=2&id=300). He rather unfortunately bit the dust last winter break. However, corydoras ("cory cats") remain some of my most favorite aquatic entertainment.

Incidentally, on the recommendation of Matt I am currently in the middle of reading The Dark Is Rising Sequence. I just finished the 2nd book and will be moving along to Greenwitch shortly.

Re: Cory Kittens

[sagittalbreast.livejournal.com]

My favorite "cory" type of catfish is the Schwarzy (sp?). They swam like little sharks all over the place. . .not like those lazy, good for nothing plecos.

Re: Cory Kittens

[corydoras.livejournal.com]

agreed.

but there are species i find TOO hyperactive. i had a couple of danios once that drove me bonkers because they chased each other around like first graders on the playground. it was like a rumble in that tank 24/7. viewing such constant chaos can raise a person's blood pressure.

Re: Cory Kittens

[sagittalbreast.livejournal.com]

Yeah, unfortunately I had a cory (recently deceased from dropsy) that would not sit still. I thought it would calm down after getting settled in the tank. . .but no.

[sagittalbreast.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty simple.

When studying apes [of all sorts], those with more powerful jaw muscles (such as gorillas) develop a sort of mohawk on the top of their skulls. The muscles are much thicker and run from the bottom of the jaw to the top of the skull. Well, if they're to be any good, they have to attach someplace. They attach to the Sagittal Crest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittal_crest).

Besides the heavier brow/orbital areas, the most obvious difference between an earlier, pre-homo sapien hominid is the residual crest on the skull. Just a little peak.

So, we have Sagittal Crest, but this has too many hits on Google. Well, breasts are good. Sagittal Breast, there we go (this is also a view of the body in the world of radiology).

(I also had to choose a name/phrase I haven't ever mentioned before since it is important for me to remain anonymous these days)

I have a question

[corydoras.livejournal.com]

Why do people wish to remain totally anonymous online? I'm just curious because many people have written in this post that they picked a name so no one would no who they are.

Is it so you can post nasty things about people and no one will know who said it??? ;)

Or is it because people have crazy online stalkers they are trying to get rid of??

But if you are anonymous how do you get people interested in reading what you have to say?

Re: I have a question

[eirias.livejournal.com]

One reason to remain modestly anonymous is so that future employers don't decide you're too much of a risk to hire, PRwise or other. Employers do Google a person, and some people's blog entries might be ... embarrassing (http://news.com.com/I+was+fired+for+blogging/2010-1030_3-5490836.html).

Re: I have a question

[eirias.livejournal.com]

(See also this one (http://whatitslikeontheinside.blogspot.com/2006/06/truth-or-consequences.html).

Re: I have a question

[sagittalbreast.livejournal.com]

For me personally, it is because I have an online stalker (long story short).

Although, eirias' point about employers is very valid. Fortunately for me, I use a different e-mail address for potential employers and I have a very plain-Jane name. . .but some of my eccentricities (yeah, that's we'll call them) are of great use in my industry.

But if you are anonymous how do you get people interested in reading what you have to say?

I don't particularly worry about an audience for my "real" blog. All readers for that are invite only due to my unfortunate situation.