On Names and Naming

[shadesong]

This is a subject that holds a lot of interest for me, so bear with me, okay? :)

It's an old adage that names have power, so they've always been a source of mild fascination for me. I've always hated my given name - yes, first, middle, *and* last, the whole thing - and, from about the age of five, have been seeking out my *real* name, as this one just doesn't fit right.

For a while I went by my Hebrew name, Sarah. And I went through cycles of calling myself whatever random name happened to catch my attention. When I was 10, I had the dream that gave me what I refer to as my private name, as well as the public version of that name - Shadesong. It's like the say about cats - cats have the name that humans call them, the name that other cats call them, and the name they call themselves... so humans call me by the name on my driver's license, you other cats call me Shadesong, and I have a name that I call myself. :)

In addition to my early name-confusion, boyfriends, then friends, began to name me - I've had many different names for different people. Layne called me Harmony, for example, and he and I used the aliases Rock and Crystal Jones. :) This is more widespread with boyfriends than friends - off the top of my head, I can only think of one ex who never renamed me.

With the advent of the internet, it seems that many of us have nicks, handles, that the other cats call us. Fluid identities. And it makes me curious - where did you get yours? Do you use it in everyday life? Do you have different names for different places? Do you, like me, have difficulty remembering to sign your "real" name to work-related e-mails? :) Which name do you identify with most? My identification as Shadesong is so thorough that yendi almost always refers to me as 'song. :)

Four years ago, my birth mother found me. One of the first questions I asked her was, "What did you name me?"

She'd never named me.

Nine months in the womb and six weeks in her home, and she never named me because she knew she'd have to give me up.

Mybe that's part of why names don't stick to me. Maybe, by the time I got my legal name, I was too complete for it to fit.

Tell me about your names?

Comments

[danorsong.livejournal.com]

I was kinda lucky and got adopted by my stepdad at 11 and so I got to change my brith name, Elisha Kim Timberlake to Lisa Hatch Timberlake. Terry (my stepdad) hated the name Kim because that as his Ex wifes name and I really didn't like Elisha, I felt if was to harsh. Thing is though.. there are definatly times that I think, in my heart of hearts ELisha is closer to who I am. But it's not Elisha either. :) As for the online names.. that's all in the LJ.

[yendi]

I've always had a problem getting my name to stick in the first place -- way too many people call me "andy" or "Alan," with no good reason (people who have no clue my boss's name is Alan, or any other reason to get confused).

Much as I've had a number of online aliases (Yendi, Athyra, Jhereg, Agyar, Pentex, etc), none of them has ever become me. I've spent so much time trying to hold onto the one name, that building a new one would have been self-defeating.

That's not to say that I haven't dealt with building different online identities with those aliases at times, but never anything beyond that.

It's also the reason I've never named you anything else. I just see the identity you've built as Shadesong as being you. I don't want to burn and rebuild that -- Shadesong is who I fell in love with.

[yendi]

What's the French pronunciation of Suzanne?

[ilexx.livejournal.com]

welp, i go by ilex, real-time. the only people who call me anything other than ilex are my immediate family members and people who have known me for a long-ass enough period of time to where they may as well be immediate family members too. which is why you'll seldom hear justin calling me ilex. ;P

i'm thirsty and concerned and sad. how are you?

[shadesong.livejournal.com]

"i'm thirsty and concerned and sad. how are you?"

Reeeally tired. Gamed til 11:30, didn't get to sleep til a titch after midnight. Not thirsty - I have iced chai. I am really loving the iced chai. :)

Naming!

[sambear.livejournal.com]

I started to respond, then got told my comment grew up and got big! (http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=sambear&itemid=9447#cutid1)

Re: Naming!

[shadesong.livejournal.com]

I seem to have started a lot of that! :)

[deza.livejournal.com]

We all have a true name. And since names do have power, that true name does need to be kept relatively secret.

"Deza" (short e, people! if it was meant to be Deeza, I'd spell it Deeza) is a shortened form of my true name. I think of myself, the self I am trying to grow in to, as Deza or Dez. I've always hated the name Marna, for a variety of reasons--nasal sound, mispronunciation, hard to spell, growing up near where the transit system is called marta, etc. I know my mom meant well when she smushed my grandmothers' names together, but I'd have been much happier with Marita-Nina instead.

[gallowglass.livejournal.com]

Closest first, I chose my user name here from my current writing project. It was time for a change and a new name often seems to accompany that for me.

As for my most common names on the internet, I chose MacAndrew for an online community because it was a family name, but not my name and by the time the community folded, that's how most of the people there knew me and so I took it with me as part of the exodus. I mostly just use Mac though, these days, for signing at the end of posts, where the from: line has the other name, Coriakin.

Why Coriakin? I really can't say. It was probably the usual thing, a random choice for somewhere which needed a nickname, which proved felicitous. It's the way I'm known most places except for the groups I joined early on in my time on the internet, which still know me by my real name or the various noms chosen to celebrate the spirit of the groups.

I suppose it's easy for me to think of myself in different names because I legally changed my real-world name when I was 19, abandoning my father's surname for my maternal grandfather's. It was definitely the right move at the time and every so often, in idle or stressful moments, I contemplate doing it again. I sometimes think that just changing the surname wasn't going far enough. To distance myself from the person I once was, I perhaps ought to have changed the whole name, something completely different.

There are less reasons now to do it again or rather, more reasons not to do it but it had a positive effect before, so I don't abandon the idea entirely.

[m0usegrrl.livejournal.com]

i've gone by Mouse since, oh, way back when i first left home. it's what everyone calls me, to the point where a lot of people don't even know my real name.

[my real name? Stacy. i hate it. mom named me after a neighbour kid. last name is funny cuz i could be mistaken for a relative of either that Star Wars director dude, or a serial killer, neither of which is the case. =) middle name? Ann. mom gives everyone the middle name Ann. me, my sister, the dog, her husband... she'll get all flustered and go "Frankie Ann!" my mom's silly.]

the Mousegrrl nick came about when i first got online and found that "mouse" was already being used by ten bazillion people. i tacked the punky-ass "grrl" on cuz i was pissed that My Name had been co-opted. =)

the only other name that's been with me as long as Mouse is Ommadawn. it was my first SCA name, ganked from the title of an album by proto-new age musician Mike Oldfield. [i couldn't make it my "official" name, though, because it's not a real, documentable name. curse those heralds. oh wait, i'm one of those heralds....] it's the phonetic pronunciation of the Irish Gaelic word for "fool." and since my soul is owned by Coyote, i think it's particularly apt. =)

[edie22.livejournal.com]

I've always been Edie. Always. I was named after my grandmother. She was Edith, I was Edie. When I first went online, I was Edie. It's still the same.

My grandfaterh picked my grandmother up from work the day I was born and said to her "So, Don and Lynne (my dad and mom) had their baby today!"
G-ma "Oh! They did! What did they have?"
G-pa "They had a boy. The strangest thing is, they named him after you!"

And people wonder where I get my strange sense of humor from. Eventually my grandma figured out that I was a girl.

I *like* my name. I don't respond well to Edith. That's not me, that's grandma. I'll answer to it when I have to, like at the doctor or something, but most times, I correct the person to make it Edie.

The only thing that bothers me about my name is that people mis-prounounce it and mis-spell it all the time. It's not Eddie. It's not Edy, it's not Eddy, or any of those. It's Edie.

Names:

[mister-wolf.livejournal.com]

1.) Sly Wicked Mister Wolf is the name of a minor villain in a rather elaborate children's book I wrote and painted in 12th grade. He and I have almost nothing in common, I just like pretending I'm bad, even tho' I'm a notorious goody two shoes.

2.) Lyr: I stole this from the Last Unicorn, where it's the name of a good hearted, geeky prince. I've also heard that it's the name of some celtic god or other. I just liked the sound of it.

3.)Amarok: A handle I used on some MUCKs and MOOs in college. The name of an Inuit wolf spirit, at least according to Farley Mowat. The main reason I don't use this any more (the fact that it's bloody pretentious and cultural thievery asside) is that there's apparently another furry with this name; I kept getting mistaken for him on MUCKs where I got to it first, which was embarassing, and I have a low embarassment tollerance. This, of course, was back when I was on more than one MUCK, and visited it for more than an hour or three a week.

4.)The name that shall not be spoken: I hate my first name. It's not ususual or bad, it's just not me. It's my dad's name.

5.)Charles: Suits me fine.

[deus-x.livejournal.com]

Ramble mode... On.

For the last 15 years or so, "deus_x" has been my name while I'm at a keyboard. It's varied between DeusX, deus-x, deusx, deusx23, deusx242... all depending on the crankiness of the system I'm interacting with.

deus_x is inspired by, of course, the phrase "deus ex machina" which I thought was the neatest sounding phrase back when I was 10 or 11. Of course then, I mistook it to mean "god of the machine" rather than "god from the machine" (not knowing a thing about Greek & Roman gods or chariots lowered by pulley). So, by that name, I fancied myself to be a deity of computers. Now I more or less take it to mean that computing power and electronics imbue me with a touch of deity-like power. A bit more humble and honest shift on the name.

But no one can quite seem to wrap their mouths around 'deus_x'. (doose echs? dehsechs? deeous echs?) So, in the flesh, people tend to call me "Les". I'd had a long running roleplaying and live action roleplaying name, "Talien Autumnwalker", so some friends from that period occasionally call me "Talien" or "Tal" The Autumnwalker bit comes from my longstanding love/hate with the season in all its literal and metaphoric connotations.

Lately, I've been popping into roleplaying spaces online with the name "Cluracan", taken from the name of the faerie in Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics. I assume it has a broader origin than that, but that's where I found it.

In other spaces, I variously play with my given name: Les Orchard, l.m.orchard, Leslie Michael Orchard, L. Michael Orchard (for you Scientologists out there). "Les Orchard" is generally what junk mail and spammers get from me, which is funny because "Les" is what people call me in person.

The strange thing with me that people have noticed, is that I rarely use names in person. I hardly ever say the names of people in my immediate vicinity. When I do, it almost sounds gratuitous and possibly ingenuine. Like I'm invoking a Name In Vain when people are right there. I'm not precisely sure how to explain it otherwise. I know I despise it when someone works to weave my name into every other sentence to "personalize" their "message" to me.

Okay... I should stop rambling before I start babbling about that whole given name / chosen name / true name and the power of names thing.. :)

[shadesong.livejournal.com]

"Okay... I should stop rambling before I start babbling about that whole given name / chosen name / true name and the power of names thing.. :)"

Hell, no - ramble on! I always like hearing what you have to say. :)

[iroshi.livejournal.com]

I think I've already told you this story, but I'll repeat it because I never mind doing so, and perhaps some of your friends might be interested and haven't heard it yet.

The name on my driver's license is Iroshi Taka Windwalker. It hasn't always been.

I never liked my birth name. Never. My mom was *not* surprised when I finally got around to legally changing it. Like you, I was constantly finding other names growing up. When I heard the story, when I was in first grade, about Dad saying he wanted four girls, and Mom saying she was going to name them A, B, C, and D...and I liked Debra *far* better than my given name, and even used it on my schoolwork for most of that year, much to the consternation of my teacher, but Mom backed me. "You know whose paper it is; what difference does it make what name is on it?" :)

Beyond that, I had at least 5 different pen names for my poetry and fiction as I grew up. I kept changing it. The only one I remember now was Amanda Markham, and that's because I still have the original paper of some poems I signed that way. ^_^

Some time back in 97, my then-husband gave me a book entitled, Iroshi, by Cary Osborne. The main character received that name from her sensei, and it was described as meaning female warrior in, "an obscure Oriental dialect." Since my given name also meant female warrior, in Gaelic, and I was at that moment in need of a screen name on IRC because I was being mistaken for someone's girlfriend in the chat room I had begun frequenting, I started using Iroshi.

A year later I had a nervous breakdown. During the year that followed, as I decided on my core presuppositions, rebuilt my worldview from those presuppositions, and began to discover who this new person I had become was, I began relating myself more to the name Iroshi than to the one on my driver's license, because I was keeping most of this metamorphosis inside in RL, and only talking about it online, discussing it with various people that I trusted. I had my personal dedication ceremony to my Lord and Lady on Ostara (spring equinox) in 98, and was given the name Windwalker as my "craft" name. I had already discovered that my totem animal was a hawk.

By fall of 98, I had definitely determined that I needed a solid break between the person I used to be, and the person I had become. Something that would make it more obvious to the world that the person who had been was dead, and a new person had been reborn. I know that in many Native American tribes, it used to be common to take a new name when you changed so radically, and I needed something tangible to hold onto. So, since Iroshi was Japanese (I had since asked several Japanese speakers who agreed that Iroshi did, in fact, mean female warrior, though it was an "odd" construction) I was on that same chatroom, discussing what I should take as my middle name, and it came up that someone should look up "hawk" in Japanese. We all agreed that what was found, 'taka', went wonderfully with both the first and last name, and Iroshi Taka Windwalker was born. :)

I'm not on there as frequently as I used to be, but I still know that #senslash (IRC server squidge.org) is a Home to me, a place where the people there (some of them still hang out there, especially the ones most precious to me) saw me through hell and back, virtually held me when I needed to be held, gave me a listening ear and a shoulder to cry on when I *couldn't* talk to my husband about the changes I was going through, both before and after the actual break...they are Family to me, in a way that my biological family never has been. My parents and sisters are really cool people, but they to this day do not understand what I went through, and don't understand the radical shift I went through. mamadeb, on the other hand, knows me as inside out as almost any person on this planet, and I love her dearly for it.

[kajivar]

I've always liked my middle name better than my first. Denae was supposed to be my first name, but my parents couldn't find a middle name that went with it. I don't think they tried hard enough! So I became Nicole Denae. Both names are Greek. Nicole is derived from Nike, the goddess of victory, which I like. And Denae apparently means "thirsty." A rough translation of my last name in Russian means "person who drinks large amounts of vodka." So apparently I go to war, kick ass, get thirsty, and celebrate. ;)

I've always liked the name Adrastea -- I've used it for a number of characters. It's also Greek -- I seem to have a leaning towards Greek names. Adrastea was Zeus' wet-nurse while he was hidden from his father, and is also associated with Nemesis, another bad-ass goddess.

Kajivar I made up -- it's derived from a Japanese word for fire, kaji. It was appropriate for the first character to bear that name, as she was a fire elf. Since then I've just really kept using the name because it's comfortable to me.

I don't know what my "true" name or soul name or whatnot is. I think I'm still looking. Unless it's Kajivar. ;)

[astrophysicat.livejournal.com]

When I was little I was irate at my mom for not naming me after my great-grandmother, because I just thought she had the coolest name:

Lillian Delphine Ashton

So demure, so distinguished. I was also irate that I didn't get my grandmother's auburn hair. Very randomly angry child.

I am so not "lillian" though. I can't even imagine having such a girly-girl name. I go fishing, I'm a physicist, I like football, I couldn't be lillian.

My name, Cara Rakowski, I like because both names are reasonably uncommon, there are no other Cara's in the AAS (american astronomical society) no other Rakowski's, and not even anyone else whose last name starts with "rak". This is extremely convenient, and also why I made a handle for LJ.

I can't imagine anyone actually calling me astrophysicat, or any shortening thereof. I've always wanted to have a nickname, since you really can't shorten "cara", but none have ever stuck, boyfriends don't even have pet names for me.

So, I guess I have my real name. And it is not hidden in the least. Very trusting soul I am.

[iroshi.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I believe that the only power in knowing someone's true name comes from the knowledge of their inner workings that it gives you. No one has any greater magical ability against me by knowing my Name; I have no fear of having it out for the world to see. It does tell you quite a bit *about* me, though, and if you thoroughly analyze it you might find some of my weaknesses. So in that sense, yes, it can give power over one...but no more than really getting to know them does. Know Your Enemy is always a valid tactical advantage.

In point of fact, actually, having a True Name of warrior has been known to make some lesser things I've had to deal with actually back off. *smirk*

[shadesong.livejournal.com]

Right - just the words that comprise my True Name give a lot of information... things that you'd never in a million years guess otherwise.

[morenasangre.livejournal.com]

Names are funny things. They're like families. You have the ones that are chosen for you, and then you have the ones you choose for yourself or the ones that find you.

The name on my driver's licence is one I've never been too fond of. My mother wanted to name me Crystal Echo and my father wouldn't allow it. But I grew up wishing I'd been named that. Wendy was boring; there were no princesses named Wendy. It was a boring name. As an adult I've reconciled myself to it, especially since it has good literary roots (http://www.wendy.com/wendyweb/history.html) after all. The only Wendy I ever found was J.M. Barrie's, and I latched onto her with a vengeance. Fell in love with Peter Pan...and look what my father did to me - I grew up and married him. ;) Middle name - Su - I hate. Named after a missionary friend of my mothers whom I never really liked anyway.

I've had a lot of names over the years, however, most of them I've chosen for myself or they've found me. Never had many friends, and those I did never found the need or desire to rename me. Actually *blush* it is my hope that someday, someone will give me a good nickname. Only one I have so far is Bret's "Ocelot" which is more of a term of endearment than a real nickname.

Morena Couriene Sangre is the name I use online, and the only full name I feel comfortable with these days. Morena comes from a character I created for the first full length story I ever wrote - a sword and sorcery fantasy. Her name means "dark star" in the elven tongues of Tolkien, and she is a daughter of the dark lord, forever reaching from the twilight for the light. Sangre came in when I started working up a VtM character (Ventrue, dahling) just because it seemed appropriate, and Couriene is my own word. Something I came up with when I was in Paris, a perversion of the French for 'heart', a word that to me stands for empathy. Any friend can call me Morena...it's closer to who I really am than anything else.

Crys Thena Welch came from a hodgepodge of roots. Crys was short for Crystal, the name my mother would have chosen, and the name I would have preferred. Thena came from a combination of the pronunciation of Daoine (as in Daoine Sidhe) and my enduring love for Athena. And Welch came from the family name of the first urban fantasy I ever read - Tom Dietz's Georgia books. To me it always represented the ability to do quiet, real magic. Magic of power. And, if you've ever read those books you'll understand; I was a virgin until long after I reached my maturity. I'm a woman with power, baby. Crys only usually shows up away from Bret. He can't handle her. She's sassy, smartass, tough, and fun. She'll say almost anything, wear almost anything, and be downright mean. He doesn't like that, even if it feels soooo good for her. ;-)

Kat rarely shows up anymore. Katherina was a quiet, dangerous soul who walked dark streets at night, daring fate and longing for release. She always felt more kin with the stars than with humans. She's still around, but she rarely comes out. She doesn't have the chance with so many people around all the time.

Oh, and yes, I am slightly schitzo...actually I need a button that says that I am and that I'm proud of it.

[gwynraven.livejournal.com]

well, I started to comment and it turned into an essay so I just posted it on my journal

[voltbang.livejournal.com]

I'm in the "long answer in my own journal" club.

[morenasangre.livejournal.com]

Y'know, I just realized that I have a habit of typing 'shari whenever I refer to you by your given name. Bret teases me whenever he sees me doing that. Maybe it's a freudian slip or some such.

[shadesong.livejournal.com]

Hee! Probably because when I sign e-mail to people I know, I just use --'s.

[ariadnesthread.livejournal.com]

I have never liked my given name, either. Last name is fine--easy to spell and pronounce, short and compact, Scots-Irish (like over half of my ancestry). Middle name is just icky--Lee. Not something I'd ever want to go by, just a sort of placeholder name. It's Mom's middle name, but it goes better with Georgette. My first name isn't a *bad* name (Melissa), I just don't like it. I've been nicknamed Missy (by Mom's family--a Persian cat on a satin pillow name), Mel (by college friends--truck driver name), Missa (by high school friends--based on a little neighbor girl mispronouncing Melissa as Missala), Liss (by a high school friend), and Missy Lee (by the evil John Adcox). None of them work.

Mom once mentioned that she considered Marnie as a name for a daughter. I certainly like it better than Melissa. Would have forced a different nickname, too.

My first online handle (1991) was Morrigan. Johns Hopkins U let us pick our own logins, and I had recently been sucked in by the world of Celtic myth and legend. Morrigan worked....I was fighting all sorts of academic battles, I lost some of my good-girl inhibitions (they've since grown back, alas), and ravens were starting to show up randomly in my life. Alas, by the time I next had 'net access (following a two year drought!), Morrigan was already coopted by others online.

The Urban Angel I frequently use now is from "Mark Rothko Song" by Dar Williams. It's a song about art and artists (specifically Rothko, duh, but there are mentions of Renoir and Calder--the Calder mobile and the Rothko paintings she talks about are all in the East Building of the National Gallery of Art). The song starts out:
The blue it speaks so full
It's like the beauty one can barely stand
Or too much things dropped in your hand
And there's a green like the peace
In your heart sometimes
Printed underneath the sheets of ashy snow
And there's a blue like where the urban angels go, very bright.

The lines grabbed me the first time I heard the song (maybe partly because I know the museum and the pieces of art she sings about, I don't know). The line about urban angels gelled with something that's been in my head for a very long time (since my freshman year in college) and has become part of the novel I keep trying to write--the notion of angels on earth guarding and guiding. Not in a New-Agey sense, really, but in a put-here-to-serve sense. Hard to explain, but I hope to get it down in the proto-novel one of these years.

Anyhow, I never have settled on a name that really suits me. I do want a nom de plume, but one that suits. I'm unreasonably fond of Zelda, which seems like a name of reckless abandon (even if it does come from the less-zesty medieval Griselda or Grisel). The image is certainly helped by Zelda Fitzgerald (F. Scott's kinda wacky wife). I'm not Zelda-like frequently enough, really. Daisy is another I like a lot, maybe partly because it's my birth flower and I've always liked daisies. I've entertained thoughts that a book character or a child named Marguerite and called Daisy would be nice. Early this spring, I got a pretty, pretty Swatch with iridescent white daisies on its blue fabric band. It makes me happy. Daisies do in general.

I'm even still hunting for a good SCA name for when I finally get off my butt and get involved (Must. Make. Garb.). I like Gwenllian, but it's Welsh, and that's like the only part of the British Isles I don't seem to have family from. I'm toying with Czech names, but I know *nothing* about medieval Czech culture. I know, *bad* medieval historian, ignoring a place so important in my own family history (maternal Gram was Czech). I don't know any of the family names on the Czech side (except Ada, Marie, and Dorothy).

I really have been having an identity crisis for a few years now.

Lookit alla them comments!

[root-down.livejournal.com]

So, right. Names.

My real name is Brian Gabriel Root. Brian is the name of one of those three Gaelic gods of nature that people sacrificed other people to. Gabriel is Hebrew, and is the name of the angel that delivered the news to the Virgin Mary that she would bear the Messiah. Root is sort of up in the air right now. It's a common Dutch name (it's a Dutch word meaning 'red'), and it was commonly assumed in my family that it was, in fact, dutch in origin, but recent research into our genealogy is starting to point in the direction of it being Irish.

In English, root has connotations for being a part of vegetable anatomy, and being a synonym for 'origin'. On any Unix-based computer system, root is superuser access. And it is also Australian slang for the act of sexual intercourse.

I spent two years in England as a missionary for the church I belong to, and during that time I picked up the moniker 'rootdown', on account of a large number of missionaries being Beastie Boys fans and asking me the question 'Hey, Root! How we gonna kick it?' and by the end of my tenure Rootdown was what I was known as. I'm also a Beastie Boys fan so I kept it.

Another name I use every now and again is 910, which is the name of a fictional character I created for roleplays. 910 is a quetzalcoatl, or feathered-serpent deity of ancient Central America. If you like I've got a drawing of him somewhere.

And.. there's a whole mess of other handles I've used before, like Fauxx, Epsilon, Inconspicuous Man, Bodmin, Speck, and others I can't really be arsed to remember right now.

Re: Lookit alla them comments!

[shadesong.livejournal.com]

See, this is neat. I like learning this stuff. And yes, I'd love to see a dawing of 910!

[ariedana.livejournal.com]

My name is Dana Nichole. The original intent was for me to be nicknamed Nikki, but when I arrived my dad didn't want me to be saddled with a nickname right off so he insisted on me being called Dana. I'm eternally grateful, because I am not a Nikki. Except for a 2-day period in kindergarten, I never wanted to be called that.

I really never had a real nickname until Ariela came along. When I worked in customer service for Adam & Eve, we had to have "phone names" to prevent harrassment and I went by Vicky, because I always loved the name Victoria. It ended up sounding like Nikki and apparently that was a nice "phone sex" sounding name, because some of the guys would hear that and think that's what I was there for. :P I had another customer service job where we had phone names too and I was Tori there (that's how Fox got his name. Hopefully he'll chime in with his story too ::cough, cough::)

I started going by Ariela online in 2000 when I got involved in a bulletin board online and I wanted a nick for that. Ariela is a character from a script treatment I wrote for "The X-Files", and she's Mulder and Scully's daughter who was created and artificially aged to her early 20s (long story.) If Mulder and Scully had a daughter, I would imagine she'd look a lot like me. I have Scully's hair and Mulder's height, and I'm a mixture of their traits. So the name seemed to fit. I've quit using that name so much for awhile now, after I had a big falling-out with people invoved in that board, because I felt the name was tainted and I just wanted to be ME, not people's notion of what Ariela was. But I still love the name and I think I'm going to start using it more now that some time has passed.

I get called Dana Louise (by annoying family members), D, and now for some reason the people I work with in the newsroom call me Danae (which is pretty neat - it's the original Greek.) I got a couple of cute pet names from guys. But in general I have liked the name Dana. On my good days it fits me well, and it reminds me of my heroine, Dana Scully. If I can live up to half of what she represents as a person, I'll be doing damn well. :)

Pretty boring

[songwind.livejournal.com]

I like my real name fairly well - though my father fibbed to me when I was little and told me I was named after famed murderer and discoverer of Iceland Erik the Red.

I got my nickname when I first started IRC back in 1992 - I needed SOMETHING and the ones I had been using on bulletin boards were taken. I picked Darkwind because it was in a book I was reading. I'm Songwind now for the same reason that Songwind in the book became Darkwind. Darkwind doesn't fit me anymore. Darkwind is overrun with blackness and remorse and depression and regret. I'm not like that anymore, and Songwind is a lot more appropriate.

In high school the only nickname I had was "D" (my middle initial) for some reason.

Re: Pretty boring

[shadesong.livejournal.com]

Which book?

I stopped going by Shadesong for a while... I was too depressed, and I didn't *feel* like a Shadesong. So I went by Katrianna, which is the name of one of the characters in Shayara... a much darker character. Back to Shadesong now. :)

%

[crimmycat.livejournal.com]

Dorothy was because my mother was the eldest child and likes tradition. her mother's name, and her mother's before her, and her mother's... thus, I must be dorothy

as for crimmycat, well, I used to be damned good at finding four-leaved clovers. And friends remarked on it one day at the gas station/bookstore as the radio was playing the oldies song "crimson and clover, over and over..." it stuck. But crimson got changed to crimson kitty, to crimmycat... and each other them has been a persona, a person changing and growing.

these days, I answer to either, and to heatherfell besides. That's another tale for another time.

[shadesong.livejournal.com]

You're not good at finding the clovers anymore?

I still have an envelope full of them that you sent me years ago...

[technomom]

My name stuff puts me in the got really long club.

My sister's first name is from one of Daddy's old friends who Mom never knew. And it's a weird name I've never heard anywhere else, but the obvious nickname is Wendy so there we were, "Cindy and Wendy." Her middle name is nice, but they misspelled it. It bothers her so much that I'm quite surprised that she hasn't had it legally changed yet. I would have.