Name Games

For Micetro

By William mOrriS DEaN
(aka Wosden & Moristotle)

Yesterday my “email friend” Maik Strosahl explained the formula he used to derive an alternative nickname for himself – “Micetro” – a nickname he characterized as expressing his creative essence: being a maestro of his poetic craft. Anyone who follows his columns can readily attest to that mastery.
    How Maik’s formula applies to me can be seen by examining the byline above. (Yes, I am the Wosden that Maik referred to.) I tried initially to interpret “Wosden” as somehow associated with, or alluding to the Norse god Odin (aka Woden). I even tried to bring in Richard Wagner’s operas of the Ring Cycle, with their Niebelungen and Valkyries. All rather grand and creative, no doubt, but is that me?
    I don’t think so. And besides, what about that ‘s’ in “Wosden”? Do Maik’s rules permit me to just ignore it?
    What if, instead of “William Morris Dean,” my family name had been “Dernam” or “Dena,” and my parents had named me, respectively, “Willkirk Amos Dernam” or “Willim Amos Dena”? My “creative-essence name” in each case would be “Wosden” (Willkirk amOS DErNam” or “Willim amOS DENa”). And I spent only a five minutes contriving those names; how many more could I think of in an hour, or how many could a computer program calculate in a blink?
    If you can see where this is headed, please tell me, because I think it could lead several places:

• Write a guide for parents to give their children names that encode desirable “creative-essence” names?
• Write a Wikipedia entry on encoding such names, crediting Maik for the formula and citing yesterday’s column?
• Create a word game challenging players to come up with a new formula for extracting a specified nickname from each of a set of given birth names?
• Gently suggest to Maik that his formula might just be “his own thing,” not meant to apply to anyone else, unless someone likes its outcome with their name and wants to use it?

    By the way, my fictional character Goines thought he’d better find out what his “creative-essence name” is, and he quickly saw that it was just “Goines.” That is, Maik’s formula called for not a single letter to be eliminated. Goines was just GOINES, and that was it. No letters redundant, which suits Goines just fine. He is so pleased by Maik’s formula when applied to his own name that he is considering writing that aforementioned Wikipedia article.

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