What's In A Name?

Names, names, names... We all have a multitude of names. Ever wonder where your name came from?

My last name is Ng, which is not exactly a phonetic translation of my last name in Chinese. My last name in Chinese is the character for the number "five" with a "man" symbol to its left. Though it doesn't have very strong literal meaning, "five" does have implications of being in the "middle" or the "center". Or, for all I know, somewhere way up in the family tree, maybe the kid just happened to be the fifth one in the family. Who knows?

My first name is Ian and, according to many a baby name dictionary, it is the Scottish form of John. John has biblical roots and means "God is Merciful". I have no idea why my parents chose that name for me as a first name, but considering some of the alternatives were Eugene and Dwayne, I suppose I ought to consider myself lucky and move on. On the other hand, Ian is a decently popular name in Canada, where I was born.

My middle name is a little more fun, in my opinion. Tzu-Feng is the phonetic translation of the Chinese characters for "child" (Tzu) and "maple" (Feng). As I was the first child born in Canada to either family, I was given this symbolic naming, "Child of the Maple Leaf." Get it?

With legal names out of the way, that leaves nicknames and titles. The first nickname and/or title that I got was Big Brother, though it was more often pronounced as Goh Goh by my little sister. As a show of respect in Chinese culture, you're not supposed to call people older than you by their proper names, though that rule gets fuzzy with people around the same age. Two of my cousins call each other by name while my sister and I continue to call each other by Big Brother and Little Sister. We still sign our notes that way.

For the longest time (1993-2004), I used the nickname, secret asIAN man, which has gotten quite a bit of exposure. In the middle of 2004, I decided to stop using it in general, though it still popped up from time to time. The decision was mostly a reflection of a change in direction that I decided to take with my life. No more hiding behind handles.

Occasionally abbreviated as s.a.m, secret asIAN man was conceived during a late night session of Karaoke (never again...) I had with a bunch of good friends during the fall of my Freshman year at Cornell University. After wading through "To All the Girls I've Loved Before" with my good friend Willy -- I was Willie Nelson, Willy was Julio Iglesias -- we chanced upon the song "Secret Agent Man" by Johnny Rivers. Willy (Mr. Kiss My Sexual Caramel Coated Puerto Rican Sculptured Ass, himself) took one look at me and serenades me with his rendition of the song, changing all the words to fit the title "Secret Asian Man". [Rivers had a notoriously bad pronunciation of "agent" in that song.] Later on, in an email to Willy, I used the name Secret Asian Man as a lark, and promptly forgot to change my personal information back. The name was distributed. People liked it, so I adopted it, making the slight modification in capitalization to secret asIAN man.

Another common nickname is KinCross. Since many real-time online forums don't like sixteen-character handles, I had to pick something shorter, preferably under eight or nine characters. KinCross, again with odd capitalization, had a rather dubious beginning as the last name of a Playboy Playmate that I saw once. She was entirely unmemorable save for the last name, which stayed in the back of my mind as a cool name up until I had to think of a handle for IRC (Internet Relay Chat) during my Junior year.

At work, the most persistent nickname I've had is Nugget, which is really just a convenient pronunciation of my login ID. If I were to be on the two-way radios, that'd probably be my callsign. I'm glad I'm not the guy that's called Big Bunny out on the floor.

Any other nicknames I've had were short-lived or no longer really apply. I'll just make a quick list with summaries:

• Susano was the first handle I ever took on the Internet and it was used primarily for the #anime! channel on IRC. Susano was one of my favourite characters in Masamune Shirow's "Orion" books. This name lasted for about a year.
• El Cabron Loco lasted for all of a couple of weeks and lives on as an embroidered name on the back of a Toronto Raptors ball cap that I can't even find anymore. The name loosely translates to "The Crazy Bastard" and came from several incidents. Loco is a given; often I act crazy... or maybe I really am off my rocker. Cabron was a name that I entered when I got the top score in a game called Diamonds (similar to Breakout). The rest of the high scores had been occupied by Ronin (Willy again), who had spent many an hour playing that game to get those high scores. On the night that I got the top score, Willy had cycled through all the levels for the first time and got a high score much higher than all the others. I claimed that I would beat that score that night, having never played the game before. I beat his high score, and hence the very appropriate "Cabron!" from Willy when he sat down to play the next night.
• Captain Canada comes from Dominion Day 1994 (otherwise known as Canada Day, the Canadian analogue of Independence Day for all you non-hosers) where I was seen running around downtown Ottawa, Ontario, Canada with a giant Canadian flag wrapped around my shoulders like a cape. Wearing the flag has become more popular in the years since, but it didn't seem quite so commonplace in the early Nineties. I was later dubbed Captain Canada by some very attractive -- and very drunk -- women outside Houlihan's in the Byward Market. It's come back several times over in the years since when I've worn the flag again, though the name seems to follow an acquaintance of mine a little more strongly.
• The Dancing Consultant was given birth due to sudden and random fits of dancing in the help desk area at Cornell Information Technologies' ATS Help Desk.
• Homeless Spice was the result of jokes about naming everyone in the office with Spice Girl names -- Ginger Spice, or Fat Red Spice, had recently left the group. As I was without an apartment at the time and floating around from one place to the next until my lease began, I was dubbed Homeless Spice, which was better than Lawnjockey Spice, I suppose.
• E N will probably end up being the uncle that spoils kids rotten. In the late '90s, I began to see more and more of a college friend's wife's nephews. They were really too young to deal with multi-syllabic names, so "Ian" was difficult for them to handle. The easy solution? Break the name apart into two letters of the alphabet.
• Spike was a name given to me by a manager, due to my hair. This name died out when he departed within three months of my start.
• Glitter was the result of an unfortunate (or fortunate, depending on your point of view) evening out prior to a weekend outage at the office.