If My Name Was of Hispanic Origin, I Might Be a Wardriver

10 May 2008 Saturday at 6:06 PM (Games, Memories)

Names are a queer thing. It almost as if these strings of letters are a combination for a safe, in which contains that person’s personality, attitude, and possibly that person’s future.

As I stated in my About Page, I write fan-fiction when I feel like it. However, when I write fan-fiction, I always have this very nasty habit of creating documents which detail a particular character’s traits, one of which is his or her full name. I call it a nasty habit because I tend to spend lots of time on them. I always like the names I use to have some good meaning, so I look them up on the Internet, and as is my wont, I deviate sometimes to find other names, such as my own, or the name of that girl I know.

Just prior to writing this post, I went to look up my name on some websites. I knew that I had already read the meaning of my name from another site I found last week, but I wanted to see what other sites had to say about the origins of my name and its meaning.

According to 20000-names.com, my name, Caius, is a variant of the Roman name Gaius, which means “rejoice” (not that I’m a happy person…my mood’s usually flat). While it is not directly stated, I guess that my name is of Roman origin, and this is what I stick by to this day.

BabyWorldNames.com seems to imply otherwise. They don’t have the meaning of my name, but they do state that my name is of Latin and/or Hispanic origin. “Hispanic” origin? That has got to be coincidence…

It’s so weird that my name is of Hispanic origin. If you’ve played or read up (in great detail) about a computer game called Freelancer, you’ll know why. If not, here’s several lines of text:

The setting of Freelancer begins in the Sol system, where two factions, the Coalition and the Alliance, have fought each other for territorial control of the system’s planets for almost a hundred years. They had fought so long that they didn’t even know what was the cause of the war. Eventually, the Coalition gained the upper hand and started to push the Alliance to the edge of the system. On Planet Jupiter, the Alliance constructed and launched five sleeper ships – massive hulks of metal which could house many people in suspended animation. The five sleeper ships were named as follows: Liberty, Bretonia, Kusari, Rhienland, and Hispania, and were supposed to flee to the Sirius system as one. However, as they broke through the Coalition fleet which had amassed above Jupiter and activated their warp drives, they scattered. In the following order, the Liberty, Kusari, Rhienland and Bretonia arrived in Sirius with one or two hundred years between them and each of them formed political houses named after the sleeper ship they arrived in. What about the Hispania?

Apparently, the Hispania malfunctioned during its transit to Sirius, and it was evacuated near the system’s edge. The inhabitants of the Hispania split into two groups. The first group made landfall on a nearby planet called Malta, while the other group explored the system a little further and eventually landed on a planet known as Crete. Over the next eight hundred years, these two groups grew in strength and gave themselves a name. The inhabitants who made landfall on Malta called themselves the Outcasts, while those who settled on Crete were named the Corsairs. Almost eight hundred years after their sleeper ship was wrecked, these two factions became the most powerful criminal groups in the whole of Sirius, producing the strongest weapons and selling contraband to the other houses.

This was what I got when I searched for my name on both sites and Wikipedia:

CAIUS
20000-names.com: Variant of the Roman name “Gaius”, meaning “rejoice”.
BabyWorldNames.com: Latin or Hispanic male name, unknown meaning.
Wikipedia: Roman name, also spelt “Gaius”.

Here are the meanings for some other names I looked up on all three sites:

LESLIE
20000-names.com: Scottish surname, transferred to a unisex name. Taken from Lesselyn in Aberdeenshire which, in turn, is taken from Gaelic “leas cuilinn”, meaning “garden of hollies”.
BabyWorldNames.com: Scottish or Old English female name meaning “dweller in the grey castle” or “small meadow”.
Wikipedia: Gaelic unisex name derived from a surname meaning “garden of hollies”, “grey fortress” or “garden by the pool”.

ALEXANDRA
20000-names.com: From the Greek name “Alexander”, which means “defender of mankind”.
BabyWorldNames.com: Greek female name for “Alexander”, meaning “defender or helper of mankind”.
Wikipedia: Female form of “Alexander”, meaning “protector of Man”.

MARIO
20000-names.com: Italian and Spanish form of the Latin name “Marius”, meaning “male” or “virile”.
BabyWorldNames.com: Hebrew or Biblical male name meaning “bitter” or “king-ruler”.
Wikipedia: Redirected to Wiktionary. Male name from the Spanish-Italian name “Marius”.

EMIGDIA
20000-names.com: Female form of the Spanish name “Emigdio”, meaning “half-god” or “demigod”.
BabyWorldNames.com: No results
Wikipedia: No results

Enough about names. Let’s go back to more familiar ground.

In my last post, I wrote about coincidence, didn’t I? It struck me again…ten minutes ago.

According to Wikipedia, wardriving is the act of searching for a Wi-Fi wireless network using a laptop or personal digital assistant (PDA) on a moving vehicle. On the Friday before I started full-time polytechnic education, I did a bit of wardriving myself when I got onto a train which was going to Boon Lay MRT Station before reversing and heading for Pasir Ris. On the train, I took out my MacBook and searched for wireless networks on AirPort until I gave up at about Bedok Station. My wardriving period back there revealed that I could connect to the country’s wireless network, Wireless@SG, at Buona Vista Station only.

At that time, I didn’t know that searching for Wi-Fi wireless networks using a device such as a laptop or PDA on a moving vehicle was called wardriving. It was only through an article I read on Wikipedia that I learnt it was termed as such.

Then, a few minutes ago, while I was reading The Chronicles of Blarnia, I came across these rows of text:

Under the tent, they saw an old man’s head appear, sticking out of a cooler. ‘Hullo, there! What’s all this?’
The satyr rushed out from behind the bar, and pushed the man’s head down, saying, ‘Get out, you! Blarnia’s invitation only!’ He closed the lid, and put a jeroboam atop it.
‘See, that’s how we should treat wardrovers’, Naomi said.
‘Now, that’s not fair,’ Asthma admonished her. ‘After all, Blarnians go over to their world constantly.’
‘It’s not the same,’ Naomi said. ‘We may steal things, but we don’t get involved in their politics.’ (In fact, Naomi had got the idea for her dam from seeing a picture of the Hoover Dam in a stolen Earth magazine.)

— Gerber, Michael (2005). The Chronicles of Blarnia. p. 182-183.

What a way to describe wardriving in fiction. While it’s not stated directly, the word “wardrover” is too close for Mr. Gerber to mean anything else.