Gabby

[ Wabbit was] a member of Mensa (as was Fraz) at the time, and contributing word puzzles to the newsletter. Every now and then [she] would ask permission to sneak in a little blurb about our wonderful League. [She] believes that Junction, Gabby (ne Gab-F) and Lanx fell victim to [her] lure.

Source: Letter from Wabbit.

First Issue: Jan 1994

None.

[Ed. the following refers to the prior nom of “Gab-F”]

The story of my nom is not all that exciting. I dabbled in writing light verse, some good, some intentionally not so good (and likely some unintentionally not so good). If you want a sample, just ask for one. Anyway, I had adopted a pseudonym in regards to a couple poems that were somewhat pessimistic, knowing that sooner or later the pessimism that inspired them would pass. To form that pseudonym, I combined the appropiate phrase “grin and bear it” with the romantic poet “Elizabeth Barrett Browning” and came up with “Gwyn-Anne Barrett-Frowning”, hyphens going wherever I saw fit. When I joined the NPL, I decided immediately that I wanted a nom just like most everybody else had, and I liked the pseudonym Gwyn-Anne Barrett-Frowning, but it was too long. So I put it into acronym form, hyphen going where I saw fit in order to make it pronounceable. Curiously, my preferred form for the nom is not typical of acronyms; Capitalization goes on the first, and optionally the fourth, letter(s) only.

Curiously, there have been several false derivations of my nom that have surfaced in the past. One, which I had noticed and not mentioned (honest!), surfaced in a flat by Panache: it could be considered the false anti-superlative of “gabfest”; fairly appropriate. Another, which I noticed, and used in a GotS SSB at one point (as I recall), is that it could be an abbreviated form of the spoonerized “Gabberflaster” (flabbergaster). A third derivation was called to my attention by Maelstrom: the Great American Beer Festival insists on using my nom for its acronym. This derivation is highly implausible; I don't care for booze, and would prefer that they would figure out something else.

Incidentally, my researches have called to my attention that the a in my nom could be considered a schwa under some circumstances. Similarly, the dash may have originally been an obscure diacritical mark related to the tilde, yielding an “r” sound, and the f (particularly if lowercased) may have originally been related to one of the German calligraphic double esses, yielding a “sh” or “ish” sound. So my nom may conceivably be pronounced “gibberish”.

• Gosh: Gabby/Wrybosh

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