http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=110166

I don't know about you, but I'd really love to know what lies behind the choice of names people use here.

One can make a guess about some. I feel fairly sure there is a corporeal Sue behind virtualsue; Vynce might be Vynce in real life. John M. Dlugosz clearly spurns artifice. petral obligingly explains himself on his home node

On the other hand there are quite a few names where one knows what it means but would be intrigued to know why. I feel morally certain Petruchio is not a Veronese mysogynist. OeufMayo presumably isn't a bottle of French salad dressing made in the US and then re-imported. Whereas it seems plain from his home node that crazyinsomniac is a Crazy. Insomniac.

Most of these monikers, though, are delightful mysteries altogether. rchiav? demerphq? erudil? davorg? Masem? azatoth? --- gnomic or what?

In a way it would be nicer to preserve the mystery... but I wouldn't be here in the first place if my curiosity didn't usually get the better of my sense of awe. So if you feel like sharing your etymology, please don't hold back.

For myself, in case anybody else should have a reciprocal interest, I should mention that George Sherston is the protagonist in Siegfried Sassoon's three volumes of fictional autobiography, Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, and Sherston's Progress. I think one of the things that makes these books so great is that novelising his life freed Sassoon to write whatever the hell he wanted, without compromising his strict regard for the facts. By giving himself a see-through alias he was saying, I think, "this is basically true, but where I can tell you something more about what was really going on by tweaking some of the observable events, I shall not scruple to do so, and you need not be offended by it".

That's my idea anyway, and that's why I've borrowed his alias. Also I think Sassoon is a tip-top poet and have put an example on my home node.

§ George Sherston