My domain name is Xinrat. This name was created for me over 20 years ago (when having a TV remote was considered cutting edge technology) by a college roommate, Andrea Kahn. She was an Italian major at UC Davis, while I was enrolled in the German Masters program. At the time, another roommate, Robin, and I were studying Middle High German (a course, which, I now believe, gave me the wherewithal to become a teacher of eighth graders, something that is not for the faint of heart. Neither is studying the great vowel shifts, etc, that occurred in some of the Germanic languages nor the many -zigtausend other lexical changes. But I digress.) Anyhow, one day while reading our Mittelhochdeutsch primer, Der arme Heinrich, (Poor Henry), which was apparently in its time quite the page turner, Robin and I discovered the sound “ee” was represented in Mittelhochdeutsch by the letter “i” with a circumflex over it. For some strange reason, this fascinated us to no end, which, upon reflection some twenty years later, seems to be a rather odd thing to have spent any time on. Perhaps it was because English is so lacking in any letter markers unlike Spanish’s tilde over n, or the use of two, count them two, accents (accent grave and accent aigu) and the cedilla by the French or those high-spirited and happy German umlauts. We shared this with Andrea who, of course, also understood the paucity of letter markers in English, being an Italian major, a language, which also uses its own share of markers. We created names for ourselves, and mine was Xinrat. The “x” stands for the first syllable of my name, “Christ”; the “i” is the long e sound (sadly it is nearly impossible to find an “I” with a circumflex, which is my cross to bear in life, I suppose.); and the “n” for well, the “n” sound at the end of my name. “Rat” refers to my erstwhile pet rats, Anastasia and Phoebe that I had in middle and high school. When Robin and I moved to Germany, one of the friends we made there drew a picture of his interpretation of what a Xinrat looked like. It remains to this day one of the most flattering portraits of me.

I suspect that the three of us just needed to get out more.

A side note: “-zigtausend” is German meaning “lots and lots of “. “Zig “ is the equivalent of our suffix “-ty” that we add to numbers to create twenty, thirty, forty, etc.

Another side note: “Rat” means “advice” in German. I’m still not sure it that means anything. Draw your own conclusions.