What’s in a name?
For those curious, the term nerdlusus has a slightly interesting story behind it.
It started one night at The Daily Illini in the fall of 2005 when I was joking around about what I was going to do after my term ended as editor-in-chief. Having very little clips, I was probably going to do reporting work (which I did) but it was amusing to kid about starting up a fictional consulting firm for students.
One thing led to another, and I began looking through a beat-up, worn-down, paperback copy of Roget’s Thesaurus to find the perfect name for my consulting firm. I stumbled across two really interesting words that I combined: preux and lusus. I changed the spelling on the second word, put them together and came up with Preuxlusis (pronounced “Pro-lu-sis”), which sounded really slick and looked good on the letterhead and business cards I created and handed out to friends as a joke (”Call me sometime, we’ll do business!”)
What does it mean? The word preux meant “gallant” and lusus was defined as “monster.” The idea of a “gallant monster” kind of appealed to me.
So, I kind of like the idea of a “nerd monster” of sorts, especially for a blog concept. What would a nerdy monster be like?
I imagine it would be something like this blog intends to be.