Sunday, March 27, 2005
What the heck does "abbagav" mean?
Well, in short, abbagav is "Abba"-"Gav". The Abba is Hebrew for Dad. The Gav is short for my name, Gavriel. I started using this as my online, web-based moniker back when the world (wide web) was young and I was first signing up for things.
Web-based email, instant-messaging, it all required a nickname. Since we had just had our first daughter, my thought was the proud "RachelsDad", or better yet, "RachelsAbba" since I had made Aliyah (moved to Israel). And neither of those names was taken anywhere!
Then I realized I might have more children down the road (I'm prophetic at times). Of course it wouldn't be "fair" to the rest of my children! They would email me (when they learned to email at all) as "RachelsAbba". So for the sake of Tamar and Miriam, I genericized. I started with AbbaGavriel but it was a little verbose and long-winded (totally inappropriate for me). So I edited that down to the punchy AbbaGav. (Pronunciation guide: Ah-Buh-Gahv. Hit the 1st and the 3rd syllables when you say it.)
I've used it so much, some people at work actually address me as AbbaGav rather than Gavriel. Forget the fact that I forgot the password to the original AbbaGav chat account and now have to use AbbaGav2. And now the latest indignity. As I search around for my site on Google, typing in AbbaGav and looking at the results, expecting to get top-ranking on my own nickname, what do I find?
A UK-based fan of ABBA. Oh the indignity. Please, you've got to help me get my page rank up, somebody, please link to me!
[update: may 30, 2005--I've been blogging for a few months now and my slowly recovering level of dignity demands I lower the sense of pandering for links in the above text. So please consider the bolded plea for people to link to me to be reduced to simple italics now. Thank you. Oh, and thanks also to those of you who have linked to me so far, it's put a smile on my face.]
[update: july 16, 2006--Wow, I can't believe I left this pathetic plea for attention unmodified for so long. But it worked. Now I'm linked by lots and lots of people and I can't even keep track of it anymore, so please, please stop linking to me. Just kidding. You can still link; I won't complain.]
If you really, really liked this -- or even really, really hated it -- there's lots more:
Web-based email, instant-messaging, it all required a nickname. Since we had just had our first daughter, my thought was the proud "RachelsDad", or better yet, "RachelsAbba" since I had made Aliyah (moved to Israel). And neither of those names was taken anywhere!
Then I realized I might have more children down the road (I'm prophetic at times). Of course it wouldn't be "fair" to the rest of my children! They would email me (when they learned to email at all) as "RachelsAbba". So for the sake of Tamar and Miriam, I genericized. I started with AbbaGavriel but it was a little verbose and long-winded (totally inappropriate for me). So I edited that down to the punchy AbbaGav. (Pronunciation guide: Ah-Buh-Gahv. Hit the 1st and the 3rd syllables when you say it.)
I've used it so much, some people at work actually address me as AbbaGav rather than Gavriel. Forget the fact that I forgot the password to the original AbbaGav chat account and now have to use AbbaGav2. And now the latest indignity. As I search around for my site on Google, typing in AbbaGav and looking at the results, expecting to get top-ranking on my own nickname, what do I find?
A UK-based fan of ABBA. Oh the indignity. Please, you've got to help me get my page rank up, somebody, please link to me!
[update: may 30, 2005--I've been blogging for a few months now and my slowly recovering level of dignity demands I lower the sense of pandering for links in the above text. So please consider the bolded plea for people to link to me to be reduced to simple italics now. Thank you. Oh, and thanks also to those of you who have linked to me so far, it's put a smile on my face.]
[update: july 16, 2006--Wow, I can't believe I left this pathetic plea for attention unmodified for so long. But it worked. Now I'm linked by lots and lots of people and I can't even keep track of it anymore, so please, please stop linking to me. Just kidding. You can still link; I won't complain.]
