"Bil Bowen" or "Bill Bowen"? One L or two? Well, my given name is William. In my early days of computer use (the days of 300 baud dial-up modems and ASCII-based Bulletin Board Systems) I always wanted to have Bill as my username because well, it was the name by which I was known. As is still the case today, "Bill" is always taken by someone who got it first, but Bil (phonetically identical, losing the extraneous "L") was always available in this realm of unique ID text-strings. As more people came online, even that wouldn't cut it and so I began to use the contraction "bilbowen" as a username because there was always a 2-L'd Bowen who'd been there first. If I'm typing my name in a text field or printing it on paper, I use "Bill." When I sign my name, though, my signature looks more like B:\, and I suppose there's technically only one "L" there, though this is more a product of the rote signing gesture than any conscious effort to leave off an L. I once came across a picture I'd done for school as a young child of a green fish swimming in orange water. The artist had signed it in the lower right hand corner (as fine artists do), but had not placed the B far enough left from the edge of the paper for the second L and so the signature read "BIL"... So, I guess it kinda started there. |