How Did You Get Your Forum Name?

[Macsen]

My name was taken from an old book of Roman history, he was some minor player.

Macsen is the celtic version of the same name. Maximus came over to Britain at one point.

[New Horizon]

I use the name of a famous smartass...

 

Spill it dude. We've shown ours, now show yours.

[Maximius]

Macsen is the celtic version of the same name. Maximus came over to Britain at one point.

 

 

No, no, its not Maximus, its MaxIMIus.

[Mr Mike]

Well being of the male gender and my name being Mike I sort of decided to use that... maybe I should have spent longer on deciding.

[gleeful]

I stumbled upon the word "gleeful" in an english book (I'm Austrian so my mother tongue is German) and liked it's double-meaning of fröhlich and schadenfroh. That was about 8 years ago - been using it on a lot of forums ever since.

[demagogue]

Babelfish is telling me "fröhlich und schadenfroh" = "merrily and harm-gladly".

I understand how gleeful = "merrily" ... but I'm not sure how gleeful = "harm-gladly".

Sounds like a very bad translation (on Babelfish's part) that's confused me.

Edited August 19, 2006 by demagogue

[OrbWeaver]

Schadenfroh is "mischievous" or "maliciously cheerful".

[Ishtvan]

I thought it was something like the joy derived from the suffering of others?

[OrbWeaver]

That's schadenfreude. I guess they're pretty similar in meaning though.

[Schatten]

Schadenfreude is the noun, schadenfroh the adjective.

 

Schatten is simply "shadow" in german. I go under Schattentänzer on TTLG (shadow-dancer), which was too long for IRC so I trimmed it down.

 

The pseudonym I use as a musician (Voidshaper) is meant to capture the act of creativeness of any kind, ie morphing neural activity into something tangible in form of art.

[OrbWeaver]

I keep thinking I should learn German, it seems like a really logical language (like Latin) without all of the pronounciation issues of French.

 

Russian is similar apparently, and very easy for scientists and engineers to learn due to its regularity.

[Gildoran]

I've been learning Japanese some, and I think it's also very logical and easy to pronounce. (the grammar even reminds me of Python's syntax for function calls with named arguments) Kanji is a pain to learn, but actually makes reading much easier and faster than using an alphabet, once you know it.

[OrbWeaver]

Japanese is weird though, it has hardly any tenses or other grammatical structure, but about 25 different words for "I" depending on the age, sex and social positions of the speaker and audience.

 

Not a language for me really, I am not at all big on the whole "social hierarchy" thing.

[demagogue]

From someone who has studied both German and Japanese, German is of course faster/easier to learn, since English is in part a Germanic language after all, it picks up fast. Japanese is fun just because the kanji ramp it up to a whole new level, like really learning an alien language. There may be changes in the grammer based on social hierarchy, but you really don't have to learn any of that to be conversational and it shouldn't be a deterrent. E.g., you most often omit the word "I" and "you" altogether, so it doesn't matter which word you use. And it has a grammatical structure, just one that doesn't map well onto Western languages.

 

They actually have interesting similarities (compared to English): the pronunciation virtually always follows directly from the spelling, and the grammer follows pretty regular rules with few exceptions; both have troves of neologisms (I think is the term), the ability to cram smaller words together to make up new words, and you can apparently just keep stacking them up. Also, in both languages you very often have to wait until the damn end of the sentence to hear the verb to have any idea what's going on!

[BrokenArts]

Shameless self promotion, it's who I am.

 

BrokenArts

Edited August 20, 2006 by BrokenArts

[obscurus]

No, no, its not Maximus, its MaxIMIus.

 

 

Maximus was an fairly common Roman cognomen (a name that is usually given as a nickname or for a family branch, or the town an individual comes from), and Maximius is in minor variation on it, albeit an extremely uncommon one - the usual variant was Maximinius. It means "largest" or "greatest". Maximus would be a good name for a Roman Centurion, and was commonly given to large men, or possibly an ironic name for a midget.

 

My username reflects both my love of stealth based games, and of remaining anonymous on public internet fora - "obscurus", from the Latin meaning "of the dark" "concealed" "covered over" or "shadowed" "shadow"or "darkness" (also see obscuri, obscurare).

 

Terribly original I know, I'm sure there are a few thousand variations of "obscurusXYZ@hotmail.com", but I guess I dived in first on the Darkmod Forums, and it seems fairly appropriate. I generally use it on any forum where it isn't already taken by someone else.

[Ishtvan]

Ishtvan is the phonetic pronunciation of the Hungarian name Istvan, which is equivalent to the English "Steven," and I guess the Spanish name Esteban is somewhere in the middle. Being neither named Steven nor Hungarian, this name makes the most sense for me.

[ascottk]

In RL I go by Scott. My initials are ASK so I go by my middle name with my first & last initials. In IRC I used to go by Alter-ID as in alternative identity or a spin on alter-ego.

[Gildoran]

Heh, actually I'm named Steve and I'm part Hungarian.