How I Chose My Nickname

One day I needed to choose a new nickname. I’ve had different nicknames in the past, none of them stuck. They were either too complicated, ugly, or hard to pronounce.

I’ve identified some of the rules that I found useful and can recommend today to everyone:

• Consider only [a-zA-Z0-9] ASCII symbols. There should be no special symbols, such as underscores or asterisks. They are relics to me. It also excludes diacritics. Even though most modern environments accept non-ASCII symbols and diacrticis, there are a couple of reasons against it: people read diacritics differently; computers might show non-ASCII symbols incorrectly. You’ve probably seen the � symbol before. Thus, the basic alphanumeric ASCII makes it easy to stand out with its simplicity and allows for backwards compatibility.
• Select an easy-to-remember nickname. Ideally, it should be one word. So there is nothing glued together. There should be no obscurity. Modern chat programs let you ping someone by the nickname. The easier the nickname is to remember and type with the keyboard, the less friction there is for everyone.
• Choose something unique. Being in an online community with many users, trying to ping john when there are also users johny123 and jack is hard. A unique nickname also makes your identity recognizable.
• Try to avoid mixing the word case. Prefer delight or DELIGHT over deLight. For example, in esports they forcefully show your nickname either in lowercase or uppercase, which breaks the intended idea if you mix the case. My preference is to choose a lowercase nickname. Today lowercase letters also represent a casual tone and friendliness. For me it’s also more pleasurable to eyes.
• Prefer nouns to verbs. People naturally identify a person with a noun. There are words like caterpillar and lumberjack. You get the idea: it should be tangible.

I drafted a list of potential nicknames. Even having followed the suggested rules, the variants were still not good enough for me.

I came up with an idea: what if I picked an existing English noun, transliterated it into Japanese, and then adapted it back into English by the literal pronunciation? I’ve never seen anyone doing it. So I picked a noun and an adjective: Big Joe. I translated it into Japanese using an online translator. I’ve got ビッグ・ジョー. The resulting nickname was biggujo. It isn’t ideal by any means. Yet it’s recognizable and simple to pronounce. It also resembles a noun.

I’ve been using biggujo since 2021, during my early university days. It stuck with me, and I can’t imagine anything else now. Choose your nickname wisely. It’ll stick with you for a long time or even forever.