So what made you choose you screen name?
#44
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Simply because I am under 5 feet tall and one of my friends fathers used to call me that, also Shrimp and even now in my 70's, get a warm fuzzy about that person when I am rarely referred to in that way. Have a nice day.<BR> halfpint.
#47
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My name is Susan, which is shared by many, many women of my generation (40's), so I wanted something different. Anything with traveling in it sounded cliche, so I stuck with the city I live in Bellaire, Texas, but it needed something with it. Although I'm no longer a young thing, for some reason "bellairegirl" just had a ring to it.
#48
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Carta Pisana: the oldest extant maritime chart, dated 1275.<BR><BR>I love maps, atlas books, etc - the information one can derive from them - their graphic beauty - the ability to determine one's place from the stars and the sun. (And truth be told - I've always wanted an Italian moniker)<BR><BR>
#54
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I had planned a couple of trips on the site (and always used my real name). My boss asked where my good ideas came from, and I decided I really didn't need for him to note the times and dates of my posts (not that I spend ALL my work time online). So I began using uhoh and [email protected] as my nom de web. I also liked that once in a while I could get a bit, um, fresher in responses, behind a thin veil of semi-anonymity.
#57
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About five years ago, when I first began posting on a local (Seattle) internet board, I noticed that almost everyone on it had adopted a nickname of some sort so I decided to do the same and settled on Capo because this particular board was focused primarily on music (which I love) and I play guitar. For those who don't play guitar, a capo (pronounced, in English -- American English at least -- with a long a, as "kay-po"
is that little movable bar one places on the fretboard of a guitar to uniformly raise the pitch of all the strings. <BR><BR>At that time, I didn't know that capo is pronounced with a short a in Italian and that it has multiple meanings in Italian. Capo in Italian means "head" (a cape, or capo, being the tip or "head" of a piece of land), English has many related words such as cap, capital, capitol, captain, etc., and the way capo for a guitar is related is that it's actually short for "capotasto" which means, literally, the head of the fingerboard. <BR><BR>One of my favorite stories regarding capo and its Latin equivalent, caput, is regarding the source of the Mississippi River, Late Itasca in northern Minnesota. Many explorers had searched for it and the man who finally found it, Henry Schoolcraft, took the Latin words for "true head", "veritas caput" and then took the last two syllables of veritas and the first of caput to form the beautiful-sounding Itasca. <BR><BR>And while I'm at it, the same concept of combining parts of two words was used by the inventor of velcro, Georges de Mestral. Velcro uses hoops and hooks, and de Mestral took the French words "velour" and "crochet", combing the first syllables of both words to form -- voila! -- velcro.
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