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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

  • It's from my favourite Shakespeare play, Much Ado About Nothing.

    Beatrice (on the subject of getting married):

    Would it not grieve a woman to be overmaster’d with a piece of valiant dust? To make an account of her life to a clod of wayward marl?

    It doesn't make that much sense as a username for me, because the piece of valiant dust would be the husband and I'm a woman. But I thought it sounded nice.

  • When Counterstrike first came out a quarter century ago one friend had a PC and we would take turns playing it and wanted to compare stats on some 3rd party stat tracking site so we could talk shit on each other. Finding a unique name was a pain, but I got lucky with this one, which is probably based on something Jay from Clerks said.

    I've been lucky that it isn't taken when signing up for stuff so I keep using it. A happy little accident.

  • This is a question I was asked all my life, so already in 2004 I wrote a blog post about it: https://paradies.jeena.net/weblog/2004/oct/jeena-paradies but it's in German so I'm posting the translation here:

    It was sometime in the year 2000 when I had already been DJing at small parties for a while, playing house, drum’n’bass, big beats, and electro. When people asked who the DJ was, everyone just said, "That’s Richard." Naturally, that didn’t sound very cool for an alternative DJ. Then my cousin, who was also a DJ but played the more mainstream style of techno, chose the name DJ Alec-tron, which put some pressure on me. Since we often DJed together, and I didn’t want to go down in history as "DJ Richard," I needed a proper DJ name.

    So I started looking for a suitable artist name for myself as a disc jockey. One day, we took the train to the Love Parade in Berlin. We stocked up on canned beer the day before and opened the first can as early as 3:00 AM (in the middle of the night). The fun and drinking continued merrily. I occasionally glanced out the window, hoping to find inspiration from some distant land (aka eastern Germany).

    And then it appeared—like the Holy Grail once revealed itself to King Arthur and his knights—from out of nowhere: the station sign "Jena Paradies." I instantly knew that this would be my new artist name. It was as if the hand of God had guided me along the tracks to Jena Paradies station and bestowed this name upon me.

    A month after the Love Parade, I had my first gig as DJ Jena Paradies. There’s even photographic evidence from that time:

    But over time, I didn’t want to be named after a station in eastern Germany anymore, so I started thinking of a new, better version of the name. I realized that if I added an "e," the name would be pronounced like Gina Wild’s first name. That sounded much cooler to me, so it became my stage name to this day.

    I now use it almost everywhere related to me as an "artist"—very often online, with my band, and for photography, which I want to do more of in the future.

  • I made an off hand joke about farts having accents once. It got some laughs and then I thought, "That would make a good username."

    ... aaand here we are today: You're welcome everybody!

  • I first used this name during the "lulz xD so rAnDum" era, and I like to draw. So, RandomStickman

  • As a bookish child, I made weekly trips to the library. To get to the kids section I had to pass the large print shelf, and there was one book that was always there: The Spitting Image. The gargoyle on the cover scared me! But when I finally looked him straight in the eye I found that he was trying to look furious, but came across as a little goofy. That's the way I imagine myself, too.

  • My nickname was originally "Stoy On" but over time it got shortend to "Stoy".

    "Stoy On" comes from a small Swedish comedy film by "Galenskaparna och After Shave", a fantastic group of theatre actors who has had a very long and successfull carreer of comedy theatre, television and film. They specialized in musicals, with plenty of amazing wordplay and some fantastic songs.

    Anyway, the film I am talking about this time is the TV film "The Castle Tour", the summary of it is that a group of Swedish tourists are going on a tour of a castle in Sweden, the guide has them confused with an English tour, and the joke is that the guide just speaks a nonsense language.

    Now, one of the nonsense pharses the guide used was "Stoy on!", which is meant to mean "Se upp!" in Swedish, and that experssion has two meanings in Sweden, the normal one "Look out!", and the litteral one "Look up!"

    At the same time I was getting annoyed at not having a standard nickname online and when gaming.

    And since I thought it was fun to have a nickname that meant "Look out!" in some ways, and I liked the sound of it, I adopted "Stoy On" as my standard nickname, and since it got shortend I mainly go by "Stoy" online, or, if it is taken, "Stoy On".

  • My name is Helen. I hated that there were no good nicknames for it (ugh, Helly...) but I love my name. Mentioned this to a friend who was like "you could use other parts of the name for a nickname..." and suggested Lenny. As a woman on the internet, having a gender ambiguous username is very beneficial, so I adopted it, and I absolutely love it. I added extra ns because then it'd look like bad kerning Lemmy.

271 comments