I figured I was pretty well acquainted with the -nym family, from acronym and backronym to mononym and toponym. (If you need a refresher, see Mike Pope’s 2013 column for the Visual Thesaurus, “What’s in a -Nym?”) But last Friday I stumbled upon a new (well, new-to-me) -nym that fills a gap I hadn’t known existed.
Internym appears in Chantel Tattoli’s article for Fast Company about the messy history of the fact-checking site Snopes. (You should read the whole article; it’s really good.)
Some context: Barbara and David Mikkelson launched the Snopes site in 1994; the pair had met in a Usenet urban-legends channel, alt.folklore.urban (AFU) and later married. By November 2015 the Mikkelsons were divorced and Barbara was in poor health. Along came a pair of twenty-something entrepreneurs who had started an ad-tech firm to manage Snopes’s advertising and infrastructure (including a move to WordPress). They grew interested in acquiring Snopes. With encouragement from David Mikkelson, they bought out Barbara’s share in the company—and Barbara’s history on the site seemed to vanish:
Articles written pre-WordPress had no byline, but Barbara had always signed her work in the footer, using wry internyms (“Barbara ‘the power behind the throne’ Mikkelson”) in the mode of their AFU days.
Emphasis added.
The inter- in internym isn’t a reference to “internet”; it’s the prefix meaning “between” or “among.” The text between the single quotes is the internym: the between-name.
Internym isn’t yet in any of the standard dictionaries I checked. Wordnik’s definition copies the Wiktionary entry:
- noun Internet A phrase or epithet, particularly one intended to be witty, inserted in quotation marks between one's first and last names—or elsewhere by or in one's name, if this is not possible—at the end of a post.
And there’s an etymology:
inter- + -onym Coined by Madeleine Page in the Internet newsgroup alt.folklore.urban.
Yep, the same alt.folklore.urban where the Mikkelsons met.
Urban Dictionary has three entries for internym. Two of them, from 2006 and 2009, define internym as “an acronym used on the internet.” The top entry, from October 2010, is the relevant one: “A witty or explanatory phrase used between the first and last names of an online forum, mail list, or newsgroup poster’s signature. First ‘internym goes here’ Last.”
Which means internym has been in circulation for at least thirteen years!
It’s rare that a neologism such as internym can be credited to a single author. Naturally, I was curious about Madeleine Page. Who is—or was—she?
A Google search turned up several Madeleine Pages, but I quickly found the one who fit the description. Sadly, the link led to a memorial site. The first entry, dated December 15, 2003, was posted by “ptomblin”: “I couldn't think of what else to do, so I set up a memorial for Maddy.” From other entries I gleaned that Page had been living in Ottawa, that she died at 58, and that she’d been a member of AFU since about 1994. The AFU page on which the news of her death was originally posted is, alas, defunct, a victim of link rot.
Recalculating, that means it’s been at least twenty years since Page coined internym.
Related: I wrote in 2010 about how Snopes.com got its name. In her Fast Company store, Chantel Tattoli provides more detail:
Mikkelson had adopted a surname of William Faulkner’s creation, a family “of pure sons of bitches,” who appear in a number of Faulkner’s works. Mikkelson was very familiar with their saga: Flem Snopes, the central character, possessed a talent for verisimilitude, which helped him climb from outcast sharecropper to bank president and church deacon.
Mikkelson would go on to say that he had chosen snopes “simply because it was short and distinctive,” and he’d only shrug noncommittally when asked if he was a fan of Faulkner’s. But people have often pondered the connection to an alias along the lines of snipe, snicker, sneak, or snake.
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