The origin of nicknames

Reading my many comments on today's comic, for some reason, it occurred to me there are many funny stories behind the nickname Dellis which aren't generally known, and I realized that's probably true for every nickname we've met on our long life on the internet.

What's the origin of 'Xenocarthographer'? What was our beloved author doing when he chose it? Was he reading a star map? Was he calculating the distance between here to the moon in a particularly crazy math exam using only the known width of an A4 paper sheet (this actually happened to me)? Was it actually a star mOp, brandished to defeat evil Sith Lords?

We do not know, apart maybe from Seabiscuit, whose name incidentally might stem from her love of eating salty biscuits twenty thousand leagues under the sea, though somehow I doubt it.

That goes for everyone. Arbiter, who might or might not have something to do with being an arbiter, or Sans, who might or might not really hate Unicode.

If you're like me, you're a sucker for these tiny little bits of trivia about other people's lives, which might seem insignificant but if you look deeper really make you feel you're in a world with different and complex people, personal stories and origins and backgrounds and you get the picture. They're STORIES. I like stories.

So, I thought: well, why not share how our nickname was born, and stories about it.

I'll start, for good will.

Dellis is, anticlimactically enough, the result of a misspelling. On my first ever online game, I made a character who was a Merchant, a dealer, in short. So, in a burst of imagination and originality only my eleven year old self could possibly exhibit, I named it Dealer.

Fortunately, destiny decided to throw a random wrench in my gears, in the form of a sudden neurotic spasm which made me tap the keyboard in the wierdly good sounding name "Dellier" (and probably killed in exchange several million of neurons, so if you need reasons for why I'm usually as spastic as an apopletic squirrel you now know.)

From there, a new character, a bit of tweaking around with letters, and Dellis was born, who you all know and most assuredly love.

The funny thing is this name sounds quite weird in Italian, and it's nothing like any other name (thankfully, someone might think) you'd give a child, so it gets warped quite a bit.

I Larp (for those curious about photos, go check www.bollaverdelive.it), and I've had the bad idea to always name all my characters in various Larp associations "Dellis".

I've been called Ellis, Elvis, Elise, Selise, and one particularly deaf guy once called me Allison. Immagine the terrible male necromancer of the mage tower being called 'Allison'. No offense for the name, just saying it's not usually connected with undead rising hordes or gut-wrenching terror.

The other funny thing is I just now discovered, minutes ago, that it's an actual latin girl name which means roughly "pleasure", so that guy who called me Allison wasn't too much far off the mark. Thanks, destiny.

The other funny thing is, though for long long time I thought I was alone in using this name, I've recently discovered I'M NOT ALONE. I've tried time and again to subscribe using "Dellis" as a nickname to many sites, all of which of nerdy nature, and recently it begun telling me the "nickname was already in use".

Certain I was the only Dellis in the world, I tried time and again my usual password variations to login, thinking I had just forgotten I had already registered, just to eventually surrender and reset the password using e-mail.

Which WASN'T MINE.

There is another Dellis in the world. And I don't know who he/she (most probably she, given what I now know) is, but he/she's a nerd like me, and I'll LOOK FOR HIM/HER, AND I'LL FIND HIM/HER.

And kill him/her, or offer him/her coffee, or marry her (only if she's an her this one). Maybe all of them, in random order.

Most assuredly, I'll make unknowngenderpersonerror101 relinquish my rightful nickname, in a battle for honor.

(Of which I have little, seeing I lost it all when some german player on the internet asked me if I was "Dellis", "that clown with red nose and floppy shoes from the play".

I've looked EVERYWHERE in the past fifteen years since then.

THAT PLAY DOES NOT EVEN EXIST!

Or, worse, maybe the one that's been stealing my nickname IS THE CLOOOOOOOWN!!!!)

Your turn <3

We do not know, apart maybe from Seabiscuit, whose name incidentally might stem from her love of eating salty biscuits twenty thousand leagues under the sea, though somehow I doubt it.

-snerk-
My name comes from a dumb old in joke I had with a friend that I don't even remember, but most people usually assume the race horse, haha...~
I wanted a new username, so when it came time to do comics again... Here I was.

Dellis is, anticlimactically enough, the result of a misspelling. On my first ever online game, I made a character who was a Merchant, a dealer, in short. So, in a burst of imagination and originality only my eleven year old self could possibly exhibit, I named it Dealer.

Fortunately, destiny decided to throw a random wrench in my gears, in the form of a sudden neurotic spasm which made me tap the keyboard in the wierdly good sounding name "Dellier" (and probably killed in exchange several million of neurons, so if you need reasons for why I'm usually as spastic as an apopletic squirrel you now know.)

-SNERK-
50/10~~~

I too feel your pain about your name being taken, except my name seems even more popular....UGHHHHHH. I've had to be "TheRealSeabiscuit" more times than I'd like >:{

A while back, I was playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and there was a dungeon in there called the Arbiter's Grounds. It was a good dungeon with a cool name, and at the time I didn't know what an 'arbiter' was, just that it sounded cool. I looked it up and the definition I got was:

1. a person empowered to decide matters at issue; judge; umpire.
2. a person who has the sole or absolute power of judging or determining.

The second definition in particular ended up sticking with me, because as I entered my angsty teen years I went through this weird epistemological period where I became kind of obsessed with the question of how we can know the truth. It occurred to me everybody disagrees in some way about what the truth is, but people seem convinced that they're right about everything and they're the one who's managed to figure out the real truth. I've never been able to believe that there's no such thing as objective reality, so to me that meant that being the one human who was right about everything was a one in 7.4 billion chance. Statistics weren't on your side.

I gave the attitude that you are the one human being who's managed to discover the truth the mental nickname of the "Arbiter of Truth Mentality", or simply the Arbiter Mentality. Whenever I assume the pseudonym "Arbiter", it's a little reminder to myself to stop acting like I already have all the answers, and to approach the ideas of other people with an open mind.

Also, I still think it just sounds cool.