rename notice

[calimac]

My friend 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 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.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

My blocker's date was late 2003. I joined in April of 2004. Finding the block was irritating, because I'd been reading several people's LJs for a while already, and should have signed up, if only to read them all together, earlier.