calimac: (puzzle)
[personal profile] calimac
My friend [livejournal.com profile] mneme just renamed his LJ. His preferred handle had been taken by an earlier user who wrote a single post and then disappeared, but now that account has been purged.

I'm in exactly the same situation. My original intent and always preferred desire was to be [livejournal.com profile] kalimac, but that too had been taken by someone who wrote a single post and then disappeared. When signing up, on the fly I went for an altered spelling "calimac", but I never liked it, not least because people thought it had something to do with California.

So I checked and, sure enough, now at last my long-gone squatter has also been purged, so I've changed myself. The wrong spelling redirects to the right one, but I don't know for how long, so if you have any external links or bookmarks directly to my LJ, you might want to change them.

I picked it as my obscure tribute to the Tolkien character I most identify with, Merry Brandybuck. (And that's the one in the book, not the one in the stupid moooovie, OK?) He's a stuffy little pedant with a passion for esoteric historical and geographic knowledge who doesn't know when to shut up about it, and spends his time at Rivendell studying maps instead of enjoying the scenery or hobnobbing with the Elves. That's me.

When I first needed a non-realname handle for online bulletin boards, I used Meriadoc, Merry's formal name. The problems with that were that it was often already being used by somebody else, and that whenever I used it, other commenters would fall over themselves telling me that they got the reference.

This became tiresome. I needed something more obscure.

Deep in his appendices, Tolkien tells us that Meriadoc (which is actually a medieval Welsh name) was a "translated" name in his text, the same way that his characters didn't "really" speak English, and that the "actual" name was Kalimac.

I'd actually used Kalimac as a cognomen before - it was the name, for instance, of my fannish press, the serial number for all my printed zines - so when I joined LJ I determined to use it again, only to find myself blocked. No longer.

Date: 2013-09-07 04:35 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] brithistorian.livejournal.com
Congrats on finally getting to use your alias of choice on LJ! Also, my hat is off to you for going deep into the Tolkien appendices - I've wanted to do that, in sort of a "wouldn't that be interesting?" sort of way, but never had the patience to actually sit down and do it.

Date: 2013-09-07 05:26 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] whswhs.livejournal.com
The appendices are seriously interesting and parts of them are utterly wonderful.

Date: 2013-09-07 05:59 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] brithistorian.livejournal.com
I'm sure I'll get to them eventually - I bounced off Fellowship about half a dozen times before making it through, and I've bounced off The Silmarillion twice so far.

By the way, it's good to see you around - I'd been wondering how you'd been in the days since Mutations.

Date: 2013-09-07 07:00 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] whswhs.livejournal.com
I post fairly regularly over at my own lj; I don't cover all the minutiae of life but I mention major things like moving. Moving to a new apartment was probably our biggest recent piece of news.

Date: 2013-09-12 08:04 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] brithistorian.livejournal.com
Congrats on the new apartment! (Assuming, of course, that this was a wanted move and not a "something horrible happened to my previous place so I had to move" move.)

Date: 2013-09-07 06:25 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] kalimac.livejournal.com
Being something of a Brit historian myself was one of the reasons I originally found Tolkien's appendices interesting. Lists of medieval kings! Cool!

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