by the stormy present
Mon Dec 31st, 2007 at 04:55:15 AM EST
We haven't asked this in a while, so why not a little community-building on New Year's Eve?
Sometime over the last few days, afew and I had a minor exchange that involved his username and where it came from. My question was sort of silly -- how do you pronounce it? Although I guess online names rarely need to be pronounced out loud, for some reason it helps me to know things like that, and I'm sort of surprised I'd never asked before.
So anyway, my question is... where'd your username come from? Some people here use their real names as their usernames, and Question Two (below the fold) might be more applicable to them. But some of us use aliases. So where'd they come from? How and why did you choose it?
I'll start. My username comes from Abraham Lincoln's 1862 State of the Union message to Congress, delivered the year after the start of the American Civil War. (It's a very long message, and this part is right at the end.)
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
So -- how about you?
Hmmm, and here's a more abstract question: How does the online version of you compare to the real-world version? This isn't Second Life, I don't think most of us have completely reinvented ourselves as some new person here, but how much is the online "me" like the offline "me"? Hmmm.