Creating a Twitter Handle from Your Experiences

@Rose by Any Other Name Would Still Smell as Tweet

Coming up with a Twitter handle for yourself can be difficult, especially if you have a common name. And as the number of Twitter users grows, the available possibilities decline.

You can find articles all over the Internet with hints and tips and guidelines for creating a Twitter name that is memorable and personal without getting you fired. But in every case, you need somewhere to start, and it doesn’t have to be with your name. Thinking about your likes, dislikes, and experiences can yield just the right name for you.

A while back, I asked my Twitter followers for the stories behind their Twitter handles. I got a number of responses that show a wide range of sources for their names. Here are their stories.

But first, my story:

@4ndyman
Back in the late '80s and early '90s, I attended a week-long fine arts church camp every summer. One summer, we had six attendees (including me) named Andy — maybe 10% of the total number of campers. It was a strange occurrence, and we made the best of it.

Dinner entertainment was common throughout the week. After one dinner, we six stood at the front of the room and sang the chorus to “In the Garden,” but using the punch line to the blonde-at-the-pearly-gates joke: “Andy walks with me. Andy talks with me. Andy tells me I am his own . . .” At the next dinner, we sang “Handy Man” (made famous by James Taylor), only we sang it as “. . . fixin’ broken hearts, baby I’m your Andyman.”

Fast-forward to my first year of college, and I’m telling the week-of-too-many-Andys story to Becky, my new best friend. She immediately latches on to Andyman and calls me by that name for the next four years.

People have been misspelling my last name for my entire life, even when I spell it out for them. So when the Internet took off and I needed to come up with usernames for bulletin boards, eBay, and whatever else I was dipping into back then, I knew that using my last name wouldn’t be the best choice if anyone else ever had to type it. Andyman was right there at hand.

That lasted a couple times, but then I hit a site that already had some other Andyman registered. Taking a slight cue from Neal Stephenson, whose Snow Crash included a character named Da5id, I substituted a number for a letter. 4ndyman just made sense, and I began using it everywhere I needed a new username.

And in case you’re wondering, just calling me “Andyman” is fine. That’s how I refer to it. Some people have tried to pronounce the 4 (like when I proposed to Anita Samen about an hour into the Chicago Manual of Style in the Age of Twitter panel), rendering it as something that sounds like “foreign D-man.” You don't need to do that.

@FARfetched58
Around 10 years ago, I was pushed into buying a house I didn't want by my wife and in-laws who "wanted that 10 acres back in the family." Of course, it's me making the payments, and I'll have to do so until I'm 73, but that didn't seem to matter. The house was bigger than we needed, and cost more than we could really afford, and I said this repeatedly (to no avail).

So I named the place FAR Manor, where FAR is an acronym for "Forget About Retirement." The handle "FARfetched" was an easy hop from there when I started the blog, and then later when I jumped into Twitter.

@GordinaryWords
In the early 2000s — back before the rise of the blog — I felt compelled to create a website of anecdotes. Called "Out of the Gordinary," the site was, in retrospect, about as amateur as it gets: coded manually and hosted (for free) through my ISP.

At first, I focused on humorous (but largely self-deprecating) stories from my childhood. As time went on, I added whatever struck my fancy: journal entries, photos, grammar tips, and even Survivor commentary. Through it all, the site remained visible to a small group of people — generally, just the few friends and family who'd received the URL.

By the mid-2000s, Web crawlers had found my site. I was excited by the increase in traffic, but I was totally weirded out by seeing my content, taken out of context, in search engines. Especially given the amount of personal information in my stories, I thought it wise to take the site offline until I could find better way to implement it.

Unfortunately, it's been over five years since I pulled that plug.

As I look through my local archive of the site, I find myself both amused and horrified: amused anew at the stories I'd since forgotten, yet horrified at how much of the content seems too personal for today's Internet.

Enter Twitter:

I signed up for a private Twitter account in early 2009 — at the time, solely for the purpose of sharing random tidbits with a smaller pool of friends than Facebook allowed.

I'm a huge fan of language and wordplay, and it didn't take me long to find like-minded people on Twitter — people I couldn't interact with through a private account. The 2011 National Grammar Day haiku contest (hosted by @EditorMark) was the final incentive I needed to create a public Twitter account. As a nod to both my long-defunct "Out of the Gordinary" website and my perpetual status as a linguaphile, I chose the screen-name "GordinaryWords."

@cmdrsue

@cmdrsue comes from a band of Trekkies. Commander Sue London was born during Christmas vacation 1983 when an off-hand comment by her brother (aka Captain Dave Paris) inspired the creation of The Strange Crew. Four crewman have penned episodes (all of the Crew are based on real people) with even more crewmen contributing ideas. None of the stories, to my knowledge, reside on the Internet.

The last penned and yet-unfinished was The Return of the Prodigal Dave (or The Hazards of Dirty Undies) which was set down in the early 90s. Not exactly pre-Internet (we were playing MUDS at the time), but close enough. Many of us still fondly recall our ship (the USS Bob, NCC-0000) and notice things like the fact that my Prius is "Commander Sue Blue."

(Among our affectations were a slightly different color scheme than regular Trek.)

@zizzivivizz

It's a simple story, really. I discovered Neil Simon when my older sister brought home a collection of his plays in high school. I idolized her, so naturally I stole the book . . . and read it cover-to-cover in one night. My favorite of the plays was The Star-Spangled Girl, about a two-man magazine operation that falls apart when a beautiful girl moves in next door. The formerly prolific writer, Norman, takes to painting Latin love letters on the stairs and presenting her with gifts of livestock, and when he finally tries to write again, he comes up short. The only word he can write is “zizzivivizz.”

That moment in the play fixed itself in my brain, and I started using the word in my letters and journals any time I had writer's block or felt I had nothing to say. And a few years ago, when I realized that the personal blog I'd started for no particular reason had become a place to write when I just couldn't think about my grad school work anymore, Zizzivivizz seemed the only appropriate name. Since then, it's become my blog name, URL, Twitter name, and pretty much every way that I identify myself socially on the internet.

I love Zizzivivizz because it captures my relationship with writing so well, and because it's a piece of my history. That volume of Neil Simon plays taught me so much about writing and humor and the ways laughter and tragedy are connected, and it's still something I go back to like an old friend. Zizzivivizz feels like me.

@sesquiotic
When I was in grad school back in the '90s, one of the things I was interested in was semiotics (suitable enough for someone studying drama, but most of my fellow students were a bit scared of it for some reason). One time, when I was talking with a friend of mine, he joked about sesquiotics (semi : half :: sesqui : one-and-a-half). Otic also happens to be a word referring to ears.

So when, around 1999 or 2000, I decided I wanted to put together a website for myself, I decided to call it institute Sesquiotic: "Lend us an ear and a half . . . Do you feel that a word — or other signifier — that can't mean at least two things at the same time isn't worth much? Is language your favourite sport? Would you rather be usefully wrong than uselessly right?"

I've been using "sesquiotic" as a username in a variety of fora since then. But I didn't do that much with the theme until 2008, when I got the idea for word tasting notes (I'm a wine buff and edit, among other things, the website of a noted wine writer). Sesquiotics was a natural for that, and I called the blog Sesquiotica (after the journal Semiotica, which, incidentally, once published a paper by me). And when I finally started a Twitter account, of course it was as @sesquiotic.

@KillerLashes
Is there a story behind @KillerLashes? Alas, there's really not . . . just my longtime envy of boys with beautiful eyelashes!

So what's the story behind your Twitter handle? Is it something you pulled from literature? From pop culture? From personal experience? Share your story in the comments below.

Blogging about Blogging: BIN 2011 Meta-Post #2

Home from the second day of Blog Indiana 2011 (aka BIN2011). (Read about the first day here.) Common cliché would have me write "the second gruelling day," but the most gruelling thing about Friday was rolling myself out of bed in the morning. Except for everything that happened before my second cup of coffee — which I don't technically remember anyway — I enjoyed every minute of this conference.

Like yesterday, a tremendous amount of information was presented, more than anyone would want to read in a blog post. And so, like yesterday, I'll do my best to hit some of the more interesting and useful highlights.

Blogging about Blogging: BIN 2011 Meta-Post #1

I (thankfully) had the opportunity to attend the Blog Indiana 2011 conference in Fisher, Indiana, today. A day full of interesting people and great speakers talking not only about blogging but about social media as a whole. So much that I learned and so much that I want to share!

But I walked away today with seven-and-a-half pages of notes. Considering one discussion today about the merits of a 200-word blog post over a 2,000-word blog post, it is right and fitting that I do not attempt to condense all that great information into a blog post. So I'll just try to boil down some of my key takeaways for you.

My National Grammar Day Post.It's Only Two Weeks Late.

National Grammar Day was March 4. Unfortunately, it was also National Procrastination Day.

Not really. I was just buried under work and couldn't manage to pull a decent blog post together in time. But that doesn't mean National Grammar Day wasn't in my heart.I tweeted plenty about grammar and editing that day. What's more, I participated in the National Grammar Day haiku contest.I submitted on Twitter . . . which I guess means I subtwitted . . . the following haiku:

If you've much to say,
A well-placed semicolon
Can save your big but.

In all, the judges (grammatical authorities all) received 176 grammar-related haiku that day. They combed through them, discussed them, argued over their favorites, launched a Fox program that let people eliminate haiku by voting for their favorites, and consulted a cross-eyed possum, and you know what? I came in second!

It was quite an honor. This is likely the only recognition that I will ever get for any form of poetry. Unless, of course, they run the same contest next year. (I'm hoping for grammar-day limericks!)

The winning haiku was submitted by Gord Roberts (@GordinaryWords):

Spell-checkers won't catch
You're mistaken homophones
Scattered hear and their.


Well-played, Gord. Well-played.

Find out more about the contest and the winners at Editor Mark's Blog. He went so far as to post all 176 entries.

Coming up: Another pseudo-holiday is fast approaching: April Fool's Day. On that day, I'll be participating in what Tony Noland is calling The Great April Fool's Day Friday Flash Blog Swap. (On Twitter, use the hashtag #GAFDFFBS; you can't fit the whole name in a single tweet.) I don't know how great it will be, but the rest of the title is pretty sound. All it really involves is writing a piece of flash fiction based on a prompt that Tony provided, and then "trading blogs" for a day -- I'll post someone else's flash fiction here, and that person will post mine on his or her blog.

So watch this space Friday for a fun bit of flash fiction that wasn't written by me!

I Can't Get No (Editorial) Satisfaction

Sunday night, I was copy editing a project on my laptop while Windows Media Player shuffled through some of the tunes I've saved to my hard drive. In the course of editing, I noticed that this author had inexplicably used 'single quotes' instead of "double quotes" to call out a specific word.

Now, all copy editors have their specific pet peeves that drive us batty. Most copy editors, however, share (in the intellectual sense) a mental list of common writing errors that just agitate us -- those errors that we all see, that we all hate, and that we all know we'll see again. One of these errors is the random and/or inexplicable use of quotation marks. Misused quotation marks can sometimes be confused with "scare quotes" and thus transmit a meaning that is opposite of what was intended.

For example, if you see an advertisement for a "free" T-shirt, do you really think it's free? Would you prefer fresh seafood or "fresh" seafood? How would you feel about Match.com setting you up with a handsome, intelligent "man"? (For more, check out The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks, whence the following image originated.)

I'm sure all their sewing machines "work" perfectly.

But before I spin off into a tangent about editorial peeves, let me try to circle back round to what I had intended to write about. After finding this misuse of single quotes,* I typed a quick tweet indicating my irritation into TweetDeck. No sooner had I poked Enter to send that tweet into the ether than David Bowie began singing "The Heart's Filthy Lesson" from my computer speakers.

I don't really know what "The Heart's Filthy Lesson" is all about. I hope that it alludes to some book, some movie . . . some extramusical element. Otherwise, the lyrics really don't make a lot of sense.

At any rate, though, when I heard Bowie sing "The heart's filthy lesson falls upon deaf ears," I thought it the perfect song for my mood. And for editing in general. It does indeed feel at times like the lessons that editors have to teach too often fall upon deaf ears.**

And thus began a currently very short list -- what will grow into multiple lists -- of "Editing Songs" that you can help me fill out.

List 1: I know there are plenty of people out there who can't read, much less edit, with music playing. It's just too distracting. (Personally, I can edit only with familiar music playing -- music that my mind can register without actually having to listen to. It's certainly less distracting than the random grunts, sneezes, elevator bells, and HVAC noises that fill the air around my cubicle.)

For those of you who prefer or need music playing when you edit (or, for you noneditors, when you're reading primarily to learn, as opposed to reading for entertainment), what music works for you? Do you hope to build your brain with Mozart or with Bach and the Baroque masters? Do you put on the electronica and become an editing machine? Do you attack the text with rage, with a screaming soundtrack to match?

List 2: Footballers have "Benny and the Jets," astronauts have "Space Oddity" and "Rocket Man," and mimes have "The Sound of Silence." What do we editors have? If you were going to put together a collection of "Songs of the Editor," what would you put on it? (Aside from "The Heart's Filthy Lesson," AC/DC's "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap" might have a place on there, alongside Morris Day's "Word Up.")

List 3: Here's the easy one: What songs would show up on "Anti-Grammar Rock"? First up is the Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction."***

List 4: What well-known songs can you subtly alter to make them about editors and editing? Do you hear Prince singing "Purple Pen"? How about Billy Joel's "New York Stet of Mine"? Or, to use an earlier song, should Elton John be singing "Benny and the Stets" instead?

This fourth list has been played out with the Twitter hashtag #EditingSongs before, I know. But (relatively) ancient tweets aren't easily accessible through their accompanying hashtags. And not everyone is on Twitter yet. (But everyone reads blogs, right?)

If I get enough comments about any or all of them, over the various social media outlets I use, I'll follow up this post with one listing some of the best submissions.


* in a paper written by an American who had, until now, had no troubles in the quotal area. (I add this to preempt editors who might argue that single quotes were, perhaps, actually correct here. They weren't.)
** That's only how it seems, of course, and that's a purely selfish belief. I don't work with any single authors often enough to know whether their writing actually improves after they've looked over my edits. Even if I do manage to instill the difference between comprise and compose into one writer's mind, I'm still left correcting it in all those other writers' works, so the corrections seem endless and unnoticed.
*** And no, I'm not suggesting that this classic tune would be improved by "correcting" its grammar.

The Joy (and Pain) of Writing

I've wanted to be a writer ever since I picked up my first Kurt Vonnegut novel sometime in the late eighties. (It was probably Cat's Cradle.) Since then, I've put together a few things, been published in a couple magazines, populated this blog, and published some original essays professionally online. But I've never really put in the writing time necessary to really call myself a "writer."

I enjoy writing, and I have enjoyed writing: the sense of accomplishment, the pride of creating something that didn't before exist. But it has always been a small, passing joy, like winning a soccer game or getting a bingo in Scrabble. And I think it's because that joy of writing was so fleeting that it hasn't really instilled in me that drive to really be a writer.

This year (thanks to Twitter), I discovered NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. I've really started putting in the time writing down one of the stories that has been floating around in my mind for probably a decade. And tonight, something unexpected and wonderful happened.

I felt like a writer.

In the past, my writings have dwelled mainly in the realm of essays and poems. This stab at NaNoWriMo is my first real attempt at character development. Tonight, one character (Maria) asked another character (Billy) a simple question: "Who is your favorite artist?" While crafting Billy's answer, I felt what I can only imagine is the emotion that other writers feel that compels them to write, to keep at it, pushing out chapter after chapter and story after story, even if they never get published.

Billy hadn't really considered who his favorite artist was until Maria had asked. He realized that he had always enjoyed leafing through the sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Durer. Maria brought up the Mona Lisa, and Billy said that he never really got much out of the Mona Lisa. That he much more preferred to examine the artists' sketches that led up to the finished work.

(In first-draft form:)

"What I really like about the sketches is that they're both art and works-in-progress. Like, when you look at the Mona Lisa, you know that it's done. It'll never be anything but the Mona Lisa. But those sketches -- the pen and pencil drawings -- show the artist working partway through both the artistic and technical aspects of a composition, but they aren't finished yet. They're on the page, but they aren't fully formed. What starts as a sketch of a woman could be a gypsy dancing, or a queen, or a witch. They could be --"
   "They could be anything," Maria finished.
   "Right! Exactly! They could be --" he stopped then. His eyes lit up and he smiled, saying -- more to himself than to Maria -- "They could be anything."

And that was when I felt it. It was like fatherhood: I was guiding this boy whom I had created through a simple path of self-discovery. I was proud. Not only had I watched this surrogate "son" grow as a person, I had made it happen. And beyond that, I had created the perfect symbol for what this character would be like: more interested in the process and challenge of creation than the finished product.

And it was also sad, because I had also foreshadowed Billy's fate. I had identified him with -- and as -- a sketch instead of a finished piece. I had made him, and would make him, an unfinished painting.

It was like fatherhood. It was like love.

And now I have to get back to it. because I'm terribly behind on my NaNoWriMo word count.

A Failed Attempt at Using Twitter for Customer Service

Businesses everywhere are tapping into Twitter, and all of them are trying to figure out how to do it. The idea of using Twitter for customer service is really starting to catch on, and in some cases is actually working. But I recently triggered a tweet that’s a shining example of how not to use Twitter for business.

The tweet in question could be a combination of lack of forethought and someone not paying attention. That’s probably the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario: That this Twitter communication follows the company’s social media guidelines exactly.

On July 19, @shanselman tweeted this:

I don't get angry on Customer Service calls. I've never yelled. But I'm so frustrated with "Frontier Communications" I could smack someone.

I had never heard of Frontier Communications, but I thought it was an odd name for a phone company, much less an ISP (which, from some of shanselman’s other tweets that day, I think this is). Consider the American frontier — and how people communicated when we had one. So, being the smart aleck that I am, I tweeted this:

@shanselman Doesn't "Frontier Communications" refer to the telegraph? Talk about a slow internet connection!

It’s easy to see how someone could skim over this tweet and think that I was actually complaining about their Internet speed (like so many people on Twitter). But I was just trying to be funny. Like I said, I had never heard of Frontier Communications before.

Nonetheless, this tweet appeared not long after from @FrontierCorp:

@4ndymanFD I do apologize. Please contact 877-462-8188(repair ), 877-462-1105(billing)or 877-462-0488(FIOS)for assistance.

This tweet was sent out too soon, with too little consideration, to the wrong person. I was not one of the customers they needed to reach out to. (Not to mention the underutilization of the spacebar in the tweet itself.)

But imagine that I was. What does this response do? It uses Twitter to try to get me on the phone. It tries to direct my service off of Twitter, a public forum, and into a private phone call. It doesn’t show a willingness to help me find a solution to my problem; it shows an eagerness to get problems out of the public eye. Out of sight, out of mind.

This isn’t using Twitter as a customer service tool, it’s using Twitter as a half-hearted attempt to redirect customers to the response mechanisms that Frontier Communications is used to.

A better response would be to ask me, on Twitter, what my problem was. That is, after all, the first step to fixing the problem, and that would start the conversation.

Businesses: Adding a new technology to your customer service operations requires that you adjust your customer service operations to accommodate that technology. Twitter isn’t a phone call, and it isn’t e-mail. If you’re treating it like it is, you aren’t going to be successful at it.

Sorry, Frontier Communications: You get an F. You do not move on to Social Media 102.