Online Nics

[mbarrick]

This topic came up in an MSN community I belong to and I thought I'd repost this little history of my online nics here as well

Atratus is Latin for "all dressed in black" or "mourning clothes". It's used in biology a lot for black animals. For example a black swan is a cygnus atratus, a black vulture is coragyps atratus, a shingle urchin, which is black, is colobocentrotus atratus, etc...
 
I used to go by "Araneus" which is a masculinized version of the word aranea, which means "spider", and still have a the domain "araneum.bc.ca". Araneum is "web". But I got kidded about the similarity to "anus" so I dropped the "Araneus" nic.
 
A long time ago - were talking early 90's - I used to use "Renato" or more fully "Renato the Gondolier". Renato is a variation of my real middle name, René, and the gondolier thing comes from a "La Bohème"-ish story I wrote in 1989 for a friend about a gondolier and a waitress that lived above a café in Venice.
 
And a looooong time ago - in the 80's - I used to use "Emperor Commodus". I was a Commodore PET/C-64 hack (6502/6510 machine code, anyone?) at the time. It seemed an appropriate name given the hardware I played with, but I later discovered the Commodus was one of the all time crappiest Roman emperors and his only claim to fame was the record for most deaths in a single non-stop session in the Colosseum (80,000 people). Lovely.

So there you have it. A long standing fixation on Latin/Italian names. Funny that the company I work for now has a Latin name. How fitting .

Comments

[cheekydevil.livejournal.com]

And if you were still using Commodus, *guaranteed* someone would spout a line off from Gladiator every time your name was used.

Geez, right!

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

I forgot he was the emperor for that movie.

Re: Geez, right!

[cheekydevil.livejournal.com]

Yeh.

Hey Atratus, did you get my email regarding the websites of doom? I need to know if you want to be a part of it or I need to start scoping for the next person in line. Enquiring minds want to know if you're interested! Well, mine anyway.

Re: Geez, right!

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

Yeah, sorry. Absolutely count me in.

Re: Geez, right!

[cheekydevil.livejournal.com]

OK. Turns out Richard is already blazing away on the Sin City website and has something of a shell already in place. Pretty soon I think we'll get down to the nitpicky details of stuff like making the photo gallery work properly and adding in the bells and whistles & stuff ...

So expect one or both of us to be bugging you real soon!

hmmmm...

[thetroll.livejournal.com]

To refer to oneself as a pronoun, wouldn't it be more appropriate to use the superlative form, "atratum"?

And as an adjective the most common uses are "dingy" and "soot-blackened", anyway...

-- Trollicus Paedenticum

Nominative

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

Strictly speaking, I think "Atratius" would be more in keeping with the established pattern. Look at the formation of other names based on adjectives like claudus becoming "Claudius", aureolus becoming "Aurelius", etc. But, IMHO, just plain "us" has a better ring to it and is a perfectly acceptable nominative for a 2nd declension noun... and by making a name out of an adjective I am "nouning" a verb.

"Dingy" and "sooty" are later alternate meanings. "In Mourning" is more classical. Sordes is somewhat similar in this regard. Sure it means filthy, but it can also just mean black. Plus there seems to be a value judgement attached in the Latin mind, which is hard to explain but it is sort of a black/filthy --> squalid/depressing --> "sordid" progression, grok?

But hey, I'm just an amateur Latin buff. And it has been over a decade since I seriously studied it. I've been known to bark up the wrong tree in a big way more than once.

It's just a nic ;-)