Nicknames…

Someone asked me today why my username for the vast majority of forums and websites was “lalato”. Well, that’s a good question, so here’s the answer.

Lalato (pronounced LAH LAH tow) is my childhood nickname. It’s common in Brazilian families to give people nicknames. Many times the names are nonsense words, as in my name. Sometimes the nickname is derived from a given or family name. There is also a diminutive form of my nickmame… Lalatinho (pronounced LAH LAH teeng OO). Think of the diminutive as Tim vs. Timmy or Joe vs. Joey. It’s the equivalent of saying Little Lalato.

Now… the odd thing is that I don’t interact with my family very much. I have two aunts that live in S. Florida. My father and the rest of my Brazilian family live in… you guessed it… Brazil. I have a stepmom in Jacksonville, FL… along with a stepsister and brother and their kids. My “real” mother lives in New York along with two half sisters and their kids.

So basically, no one calls me by my nickname in real life. Everyone that would lives too far away, and as my friends can attest, I’m not the type to make long distance calls with any regularity.

Which brings me to this question… What’s the value of a nickname if no one uses it? 🙂

I had been thinking about changing my common user name to something else. For a while I thought I would use something like “samizdat”. A little double meaning there. Samizdat is the Russian word for “underground publishing”. It also sounds sorta like “Sam is that”. I’ve tried using it on a couple of political forums, but it seems that I’m not always the first to come up with it so I end up being samizdata or samizdat1 or samisdat… or whatever.

If you were to give me a nickname that I could use as an online username… what would it be?

–sam