Leaflocker Origins

What's this? Two posts in one day? What's going on?

Two of my not-yet-clearly-ennumerated aims for this Blapril are to interact a little more with the other Blaugustines and to try to have a little more variety in my posts, without abandoning too many of the 'regular' features. Thus I hope to add the occasional short discussion posts in response to other folks' blogs here and there where the mood takes me. This has the additional benefit of covering me in terms of numbers if I miss a day here and there, just in case I decide that I want to shoot for the shiny rainbow badge.

Today, Belghast talked a little about naming his blog, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to share the origin story of the blog here.

The name Leaflocker dates the origin of the blog to the height of my crossword puzzling days around 2009/2010. It's traditional in cryptic crossword circles, at least in the UK, to pick a nickname for yourself as a crossword creator, presumably so people are unsure where to send the hate mail. The name that I picked was Linnaea Leaflock. The name is made up of two plants, since I, like every crossword puzzle fanboy, was a bit of a fan of the grandaddy of the cryptic puzzle, Araucaria, who took his name from the monkey puzzle tree.

Linnaea is the scientific name of the Twinflower, being vaguely reminiscent of the Terry Pratchett character Twoflower and also reflecting the fact that my first name is Thomas. Also, it sounds like a girl's name, and keeping with my general theme of playing female characters when I can that seemed appropriate.

Leaflock is the name of the Ent also known as Finglas, who along with Fangorn and Fladrif are the oldest of the Ents living in Tolkien's middle Earth. Finglas is described as being so sleepy as to be nearly tree-ish, and is thus is a bit of a slow and 'dim ent'.

When the time came to make a blog, Leaflocker seemed like a natural fit, as the blog was meant to be a place to put my pages of nonsense, a locker for the leaves, as it were, and here we are. Since then a company has started to use the name to sell mesh designed to keep leaves out of gutters, but I maintain that I had the name first and refuse to change it. I've never really been one to try and keep a consistent brand anyway, as evidenced by the range of different names that I go by, online as in real life, so I don't mind too much.