Well, I know I've told this story before, but I couldn't find it in either of the two threads Labby and Sara quoted, so I guess I'll tell it again. (I did find it in a
really, really old thread on Zoom's boards!)
I've been using Kaylle off and on for the last 10+ years... I got onto the internet when I was about 14 years old, and for security reasons I didn't want to use my real name. Besides which, I was still in the adolescent "change your name to something exotic" phase. I was Kaylle on AOL Instant Messenger all along, but for years I tried to come up with a more exotic- or dramatic-sounding name, or I used a different name for each fandom I was involved with. Nowadays I use Kaylle or Kayl for everything. It's normal enough that people take it seriously and unusual enough that it isn't always already taken.
Although as Sara mentioned, everyone mispronounces it
It's supposed to be pronounced Kayl and rhyme with hail and mail and pail. But apparently most people glance at it and see Kaylee, which to me sounds like a 12 year old girl (no offense, JackieK! It's just the weird mental picture that pops up!) or, possibly, the mechanic on
Firefly. I hated that for a long time, because I don't think of myself as a 12 year old girl <g>, but I've decided there are worse characters to be associated with than Kaylee Frye. I do sometimes register for things as Kayl, though, to avoid that issue.
Anyway, why did I pick Kaylle? Three reasons:
1) My first two initials are K and L. When you slur them together, you get Kay-ell
2) The main character of my favorite book, a little-known fantasy by Patricia C. Wrede, was named Kayl Larrinar
3) When I was a freshman in high school, my best friend and I went through a nicknaming phase. Eventually my nickname settled on Leia, after Princess Leia, but we went through some iterations before that. One of them was the vegetable names phase, where we all took the name of a vegetable that started with the same letter as our first name. Not too many vegetables start with K, but there's a kind of lettuce called kale. (I know, this is a really stupid story, but we were 14 <g>)
So after all those things conspired against me, I just decided to read the writing on the wall... At least I got this way I got to pick how I spelled it
As for calling other people their real names vs. their online names... Some people I just
cannot learn to call by their real names. I learned to call YellowDartVader by her real name instead of Alicia (the nick she used back then) without any trouble, but I cannot for the life of me call Bethy or Doranwen their real names. I don't know why some people's nicks are more firmly entrenched in my brain than others...
Kaylle
