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Ask Lemmy @lemmy.world
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What is the origin of your username/nickname?

This has probably been asked before but I wanted to add another layer/an alternative.

So, I ask, where did your username/pseudonym/nickname originate from? What's the meaning behind it?

Or alternatively, which is the most creative/interesting nickname origin you have come across?

271 comments

  • Resol - can mean a number of different things. It's the first 5 letters of the word "resolution". It's also the word "loser" spelled backwards. It's two notes on a keyboard (D and G in Anglo-Saxon music notation). And it just looks and sounds cool in my opinion.

    van - the Dutch word meaning "of" or "from". Note that I am not referring to actual vans (the German equivalent being "von", which also appears in a lot of names). Also I prefer spelling that word completely in lowercase.

    Lemmy - isn't it obvious? It's this wonderful website.

    Put them together, and you get "Resol van Lemmy". It sounds pretty nice, don't you think? Especially since I really hate my real name.

  • CB radio user names are called handles. One of my nicknames is The Vandal. I think Subterranean Homesick Blues is one of Dylan's best. ViolĂ .

  • My husband’s nickname for me. I was born in the holler in Appalachia and am a woodsy pixie. It stuck and is now my trail name.

  • My initials are BJB.

    I was in jazz band in high school. We were doing a joint thing with the choir, so everyone was running around moving stuff to make space. My parents had bought me a nice music bag with my initials on a plate on the front of it. Someone held up my music bag asking who owned it. I figured they just wanted to let the owner know where it was being moved to, so I spoke up... "Hah, your initials are BJ!"

    Hence, my name became blowjob. The completionists called me Blowjob Betty (I'm male) to get that last initial in, too. At the time, I was quite quiet and took myself maybe a little too seriously. This ended that.

    One day, I was at my buddy's place, and he called me "Beege," saying he didn't want to say "Bee and Jay," as it was too long. At that point, I said fuck it. My name is Beege. Let's go.

    Over time, my friends added an article because why the fuck not.

    Over 20 years later, and it's still my name. It actually taught me to not take myself so seriously. Although, one interviewer at a job had a really hard time keeping it together when HR told her my nickname without catching the meaning. She and I are good friends now.

    In any case, I always get a slight chuckle inside when people hesitate slightly after introducing myself. I'm great at keeping a deadpan face about it now, too

  • Tenno, wake up. It's time to put on the silly norg fish mask from cetus and make it look good.

  • School nickname

    In Portuguese "zero hora" is the midnight shift, people started making jokes when I slept in class and the name got stuck.

  • The way I drove and the papers I used for rolling joints back when I was a teenager

  • I was playing some crappy F2P MMO (Perfect World, maybe?) and I made a warrior of some werewolf race. Just played with random wolf-related combinations and settled on this. Quit after two days and the username carried on for probably 15 years now.

    I don't even really know all that much about Stalin. I just pulled it out of my ass.

  • I used to play GH3 on PS2 a lot and i played boss battles quite frequently

    One time, in another game called Soldat, when a clan was recruiting they told me to change my old nickname since it was bizarre (i was 15 yo). I was looking for inspiration and quickly came up with Lou (final boss in GH3), added ` so i would be recognised easily while also not impersonating anyone unintentionally.

    Few months passed by and i saw someone on some Soldat-related IRC channel chilling with my nickname and that person wasn't actually impersonating me (he/she used that nickname for much longer time than me since "Lou" is actually a first name which for me, as a native polish speaker, wasn't that obvious at the time) so that huge coincidence made me come up with an addition to my nickname - 2nd boss in GH3, famous guitarist - Slash. In the end i started using LouSlash`

    As time passed by, in some places/websites/games i couldn't use ` so i drop it occasionally.

  • M is the letter my real name starts with, and 137 has been my favourite number since I was a kid, and I still think is the coolest number (has nothing to do with 1337, as some people have previously thought).

  • Just a greeting used in an RPG I really liked. As pretty much the only formal greeting in its setting, it seemed very overused, so a friend and I started using it in our friend group as a meme, and I decided that it actually goes pretty hard as a username.

271 comments