"What's in a name?" said Shakespeare
David Christopher Hill. Quite
a mouthful, when you toss in the middle name.
"David" seems to have been very
popular as a first name in my generation. At one point in
college, in my hall segment (Harwood Court, Rm 102, Pomona College, Claremont, Calif., "Go, Sagehens! Chirp!")
there were five people, four of whom were named "Dave."
We used to answer the phone, "Dave, Dave, Dave, Ron and
Dave, Dave speaking." Dead silence. Then, "Uh, can I
speak to, uh, Dave ...?" Usually we had to find out what
classes the caller knew his/her "Dave" from.
"Christopher" was my patron saint. He
became "obsolete" according to Rome a number of years
before I stopped being concerned about it too much.
"Hill" comes from my dad's side of
the family, the English part. My mom's side is all Italian (from
the Venice area, as far as I can tell). My dad's side is, as I
said, English and Spanish (no, really) on his dad's side, and
Irish on his mom's (Reilly). I've recently started getting into
the genealogy thang, and it's a lot of fun. One of these days (yeah,
right) I'll get some of that stuff on-line.
So there's the name. Though I formally sign as
"David C. Hill," most folks know me as
"Dave." I answer to either, not to mention "Hey,
you," "My computer is broken," and any number of
RPG character names as well.
I usually sign my name "***Dave"
(in e-mail, that is). It's to the point where some folks actually
refer to me that way (though "Three-Star Dave" makes me
feel a bit like a Holiday Inn). The asterisks came about when I
was first doing Usenet/Listserv-type stuff, and everyone had
these cool sig lines, but most folks seemed to forget that not
everyone had a fixed-pitch font in their e-mail program, so all
those elaborate ASCII artworks and carefully crafted boxes and
columns looked like so much gibberish when I got them. So I
prefixed my name and sig lines (such as they were) with
"***", setting them off from the rest of the text, but
providing a fixed "block" that would read just fine
regardless of the font.
So now you know. And knowing, as G.I. Joe
used to say, is half the battle.
