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The story behind my avatar


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I live in Hesse, the state mid in germany. It has a nice coat of arms, a striped lion. At roman times legionairs who returned to Rome nicknamed the tribe in my area as chatti = Cats, because in difference to wild storming other germanic tribes they used hit and run tactics, hiding in the forests. With time the word Chatti was transformed by Grimm's Law to Hesse.

 

Grimm's law is not a political law, but a discovery the Brother Grimm (the ones with the faerytales) did when they researched the german language. They were working on the first german dictionary and traveled the lands to search for ancient, nearly forgotten, words. They interrogated old women who never traveled far away from their birthplace. They also wrote down the stories these women were telling. Centuries later the dictionary is nearly forgotten, but everyone remembers the faerytales.

 

So following Grimm's law the t was shifted to a s and the _ch_ to a h. So we hessians still feel a bit like cats. Decades back my sister named Katja was frustrated when she found out that her name Katja was already taken by someone else in the IRC. So I made a joke and said she should write her name as Chattia, a mix of to chat and the ancient name of the state she is from. She did so and I thought that Chattius might be a good nick for myself.

 

I did the coat of arms of Hesse as my avatar for some years, a lion is a sort of cat too. Then a moderator of a math forum wrote me that only the government of Hesse is allowed to use this coat of arms. Outch

 

So when joining the Sacred2-World I had no avatar. I didn't know that darkmatters has nice people who do avatar's for others so I did my own avatar quite quickly. I just took the coat of arms of my birth town. Even the town is located in Hesse it carries the german eagle. The main court for whole germany was located in the town for centuries because it had a central place. So it was made a free german (the eagle) town, not belonging to any state, protected by the emporor (the crown). The silver cross marks it as a town which was allowed to make coins/money.

 

And now my avatar is an eagle, even I am a cat at heart, stupid politics :)

 

 

Who else has a good story about his/her avatar/nick ?

Edited by chattius
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It is no surprise to me that there is such a rich history behind your name and avatar. I always enjoys your histories and fantasies that seem to drive everything you and your girls do.

 

thanks for the topic

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Wow, what a great story! I never would've guessed it was that intricate of a story - very nice :3

 

I'm still working on a good avatar to go with my sig, but the previous one I had (gingerboyicon12.jpg) was a photo I took with my friend at a Borders. We were threatening the little gingerbread man over a steaming vat of espresso (haha, we're crazy). It was one of my happy memories, and it's silly like me, so I thought, 'why not?' XD;

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