What's in a name?

chapter-1-in-which-we-are-introduced-to-Potherca-and-some-bees-and-the-stories-begin.md

When I first heard his name, I said, just as you are going to say, "But I thought he was a boy?"

-"So did I," said Christopher Robin.

"Then you can't call him Po?"

-"I don't."

"But you said--"

-"He's Po-ther-Ca. Don't you know what 'ther' means?"

"Ah, yes, now I do," I said quickly; and I hope you do too, because it is all the explanation you are going to get.

four-of-the-nine-daughters-of-Zeus-and-Mnemosyne.md

The widely used Wikipedia states:

The Muses, the personification of knowledge and the arts, especially literature, dance and music, are the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (memory personified). Hesiod's account and description of the Muses was the one generally followed by the writers of antiquity. It was not until Roman times that the following functions were assigned to them, and even then there was some variation in both their names and their attributes: Calliope (epic poetry), Clio (history), Euterpe (flutes and lyric poetry), Thalia (comedy and pastoral poetry), Melpomene (tragedy), Terpsichore (dance), Erato (love poetry), Polyhymnia (sacred poetry), Urania (astronomy).

To be able to remember the muses that inspire me most, I came up with the Name mnemonic Po-Th-Er-Ca

mistakes-from-my-stoner-past.md

In my younger days, as many a teenager in the Netherlands in the ninties, I used to occasionally smoke marijuana, otherwise known as "pot"

In the early days of the internet, having one handle wan't really a thing, other than on IRC and ICQ (Yes, I was already online in 1996, thanks for noticing). I, like most people, would use different names in different places.

Most sites would, also, not tell you which constraints they placed on user-names.

One fateful afternoon, I was creating an account somewhere... It could have been Bolt or GeoCities or something...

Anyway, playing around with words, I had typed in the username pot her cannabis. As it turns out, the place did not accept user-names with more than 8 characters. And it did not accept spaces in user-names. It also did not tell me this.

It just stripped the whitespace and cut the input off after the eighth character, leaving me with the username potherca.

It looked cool enough, so I stuck with it for a while. I started using other handles less and less, and "potherca" has been with me ever since.

Origin of my online handle "Potherca".md

Every so often I get asked about the origin of my online handle "Potherca".

Where did it come from? What does it mean? How is it pronounced?

This gist contains some of the explanations I give... Mind you, not all of them are 100% true... But so it is online.