http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=121723


in reply to Name Space

'qu@f.f' was a somewhat minimal thing to put in a From line to an NNTP server, and it's derived from 'quaff', though I don't drink much so it's not really descriptive. Sometimes I would tell people that quaff, as a noun, stands for "a deep drink", so I'm "deep" :) plus it has a "still waters run deep" overtone. Maybe not.

Anyway, I came across the word quaff in a poem by Longfellow called "The Skeleton in Armor", part of which I used as a .sig for a while:

While the brown ale he quaffed,
Loud then the champion laughed,
And as the wind-gusts waft
The sea-foam brightly,
So the loud laugh of scorn,
Out of those lips unshorn,
From the deep drinking-horn
Blew the foam lightly.

I like that poem a lot for some reason, especially that stanza where the sea foam is wafted by the wind while the beer foam is wafted by the viking's breath. Also, in "The Raven" by Poe, there is a famous line that goes "Quaff, O quaff this fine nepenthe". Maybe you can tell that I was somewhat into poetry at that time. :)

Finally, both quaff and kwoff are similar (five letters, 3rd character a vowel, last two characters the same) to my real name, Scott.