What does your screen name signify?

[WIDisneyFan]

Mine is a bit boring "WI" is for Wisconsin which is home and the "DisneyFan" part pretty much self explanatory

 

[WeIcomeHome]

My unoriginality...

 

[VGCgroupie]

My unoriginality...

I love it!!

 

[heathpack]

In college, I studied English literature- poetry specifically- modern poetry even more specifically.

My screen name is from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. It was written in the Victorian period but all of the authors works were published post humously. So Hopkins did not live during the "Modern" literary period (~1900-1940) but he is considered the father of modern poetry. If you like poetry, Hopkins is technically a master, he's someone you can really appreciate.

The poem I am referring to is called Inversnaid (which is a town in Scotland):

Inversnaid

This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

A heathpack is a clump of heath, which is a small shrubby plant.

I wrote an explication of this poem for an assignment and I really just "got it". The explication caught the eye of my professor, who was himself a poet, and led to some very interesting work directly with him. So this one poem opened a lot of doors for me, and Gerard Manley Hopkins helped me understand a lot- some other poetry by Chaucer and also classical Chinese poetry, and also later on, chemistry when I decided to go to vet school instead of pursuing a PhD in literature. One things Hopkins will teach you is that the position of every syllable matters. Just like in organic chemistry, where the position of every electron matters! Lol, as my husband says when I try to talk poetry with him: "tl/dr, wow you got a lot out of that".

The short version: "Heathpack" is from a poem that is very meaningful to me.

 

[CarolynFH]

@heathpack all this time I thought your screen name referred to your dachshunds, which I know of from TUG - I could see them as a pack hunting through the heath….

PS I loved Hopkins’s poetry too.

 

[Wedgeout]

Well my visions of a pack of milk chocolate-covered English toffee are squashed.

 

[VGCgroupie]

I love how so many SN are nt anything what I thought they were. I think @Sandisw is still my biggest misconception. I for sure thought she was Sandi Southwest.

 

[heathpack]

@heathpack all this time I thought your screen name referred to your dachshunds, which I know of from TUG - I could see them as a pack hunting through the heath….

PS I loved Hopkins’s poetry too.

lol that too. However Heathpack predates dachshunds for me. I had a Gordon setter when I first starting using that screen name.