Pseudonyms

Alright David, just who the hell are Gib5on and Sabian and what kind of names are those anyway?

When we were expecting our first we didn't know the sex and hadn't really decided on a name but still wanted a name to use in conversation.  At the time I was reading William Gibson's recent books; something in the Pattern Recognition series and thought "Gibson" would be a neat name for a child.  But since I was thinking William Gibson I decided that a Leet Speak version of the name using a "5" for the "S" would be more interesting.  And so we started using Gib5on as a placeholder name for our first.

Two interesting things here.  First, it turns out that you really can't name a child Gib5on.  The US Social Security administration will only issue a Social Security number to children with names composed completely of letters; no numbers or symbols.  You pretty much have to have a Social Security number, so that nixes it pretty well in the bud.

The second is more funny.  A fried of ours was writing a book about parenting when we were expecting and she chose to reference us in the acknowledgements: me, my wife, and Gib5on.  Her editor checked with her at least three times before the book went to print that the "5" wasn't a typo.  So even though we don't call the boy Gib5on any more it is memorialized in the book.

After Gib5on was born I discovered that my very first friend in life  (our mothers were college friends) had named her boy Ellison.  She didn't do it for the author, but I think it would have been cool to have toddler friends Gib5on and Ellison.

When the second child came along we needed another placeholder name.  We decided it would be bad form to recycle the first name and set out to come up with another.  Mrs. T was kinda over the scifi dimension of Gib5on and so she decided that actually it was Gibson like the guitar.  That lead us for a brief time to use Fender and the placeholder for the new arrival.  Not soon after coming to that conclusion we discovered that Fender was actually having a very bad year with respect to women.  Since we were a little bit hoping for a girl we thought that was an unfortunate dimension to the thing and discarded the moniker.

From Fender we briefly entertained Zildjian, but that seemed too on the nose.  We thought for about 10 seconds about Paiste but discarded that on similar grounds to Zildjian.  That lead us to Sabian and that stuck.  Well it least it stuck for me.  I'm not sure it stuck for Mrs. T.

So, if you are reading here and you see me talking about Gib5on or Sabian you know I am talking about my kids.