Noms de web and elsewhere

Apparently three posts three days ago isn’t enough for some people. 🙂 So here’s one I’ve had on my List of Things to Post About for some time.

My name is Peter. Always has been, always will be. Over the years people have tried to assign me nicknames, but only a few have caught on for more than a day at at time.

I generally don’t mind being called something else, as long as it’s not (shudder) Pete—do I look like a Pete to you?—but I don’t really encourage it either. Still, some have stayed around in certain groups, so here are the stories:

Peetay was given to me early in my first year at university by Bob Kapur, the Giver of Names. It came about when I mentioned that both of my parents were French teachers; Peetay was, obviously, how the French would pronounce my name, since it’s spelled similarly to aller and parler (pronounced allay and parlay, respectively). (Fortunately he didn’t realize that péter is a French word, and I didn’t enlighten him to its meaning.) Bob and Dave Drewe popularized it around our residence floor, and those two and Dave’s wife Avvey are the only ones who still use it at all.

Warlord was the result of two ricochets. Bob’s the culprit again: he decided that one of the guys on our floor looked like Glory, a pro wrestler in what was then known as the WWF. Naturally Glory‘s roommate received his tag team partner Power, which was doubly funny because a) he was in the electrical engineering program, and b) he was physically about as far away as you can get from a pro wrestler.

I got to be friends with Mark (Power) and when Bob realized we hung out together he decided I needed a wrestling name to go along with them. It so happened that Power & Glory had recently been part of a six-man tag team match with Warlord, and because I was already follicly challenged and goateed the name was a natural fit.

This one was a bit of a running gag, particularly with Dave. Never mind my mild manner; appearance was key, and I became the Warlord of more things than I can remember, each more outrageous than the last. The culmination was when, via the whiteboard on my door, he anointed me the Warlord of Carnal Deviant Lust.

Somehow Dave quickly shucked the Psycho moniker Bob gave him. And Bob managed to completely avoid getting a nickname himself!

PeterJanes is my name at work. This one’s straightforward: we currently have five Peters at work (seven if you count Pedro and Petros) and there are only so many variations available.

I do have one more nickname that stems from the way I sign my email. Actually, it’s more of a pet name (no, not the Fido kind) and it’s known and for use by one person alone… so in the immortal words of the Soup Nazi, No soup for you!