What's in a name?
Previously, I used my full name for my website, as well as for my online profiles. Which is not Nizzlay, obviously.
There’s no exciting reason why I stopped doing that. No crazy scandals. I don’t believe anything bad would happen if you found out that my full name is Niels Gouman. Hell, I still share my LinkedIn in the footer.
Some bloggers say they would stop blogging if anybody found out their real identity. I don’t have some secret personality like that, I don’t really have anything to hide[1], I just felt like it.
“Nizzlay” is more of a nickname, even though no one in real life actually calls me this any more.
It started in high school. When Mr. Snoop Dogg was quite popular. Which caused a trend, people found out you could -izzle a lot of things.
The -izzle version of Niels (my real name) apparently is “Nizzle”, so this quickly became my nickname in high school.
The main downside of using “Nizzle” as a nickname was that, apparently, it was also slang for other things. Little did we know. Young, naive, and English wasn’t our first language.
The other downside was: The internet
Back then, when you signed up for an account somewhere, and you had to put in a nickname, it had to be unique. Even when you signed up using an email address, whenever you had to pick a nickname, it had to be unique.
Nowadays, we have solved for this by deciding that the nickname is not the ID, we would have some kind of UUID and show the nickname as a display name, no matter how many people have the same one.
Back then, it was all pretty new. We usually didn’t have such fancy solutions.
Which made my nickname kind of useless, online at least. Since usually it was already taken.
This led my friends to brainstorm, and eventually they decided. We could take Nielsie, which is the Dordrecht version[2] of a Dutch diminutive for “Niels”, and combine that with the izzle, leading to “Nizzlay”.
It means absolutely nothing, as far as I know. And the best thing about that, is that it’s probably available whenever I need to sign up anywhere.
Even though real world usage of the nickname has died out when I finished high school, online the name lives on.