what's with the name?

back when i got my first computer, circa 1989, i didn't have a lot of money to spare, and the technology was a long way from where it is now. with the guidance of a techno-savvy linguistics professor, i invested in a swan something-or-other, with an amber monochrome monitor, and some word-processing software that was decidedly clunky. when i wrote my first paper (i was in grad school at the time) on the gee-whiz machine, i decided i should run a spell-check, just for kicks. i saved the document to the floppy disk (the really floppy kind), and popped in the spell-check disk (i told you it was clunky). i quickly realized that the spell-check dictionary needed some serious work, because the very first word it highlighted was my first name.

if you're an american of a certain age, you may know that the name "jennifer" has been a popular one for baby girls since the early 70's (i was born in 1963, but my mom was always just ahead of the curve). so, as you can imagine, i was a bit surprised to see that spell-check didn't recognize it as a word. i was even more surprised when i explored a bit further, because spell-check suggested an alternate spelling. perhaps, the amber screen informed me, i actually meant to sign my name as "guanophore."

guanophore? what's a guanophore?? i looked it up in my bigass random house unabridged dictionary, and, of course, found no such word (only the creators of the spell-check program knew what it meant, i figured, and they had to be pretty oblivious to the outside world if the name "jennifer" was not in their lexicon in 1989. but i digress.). i found "guano," which i already knew to be, essentially, shit. then i went on to the "-phore," and bigass random house told me it was "a learned borrowing from Greek meaning 'bearer,' 'thing or part bearing (something),' used in the formation of compound words." putting the parts together, this gave me "shit carrier." for a thousand reasons, i found i strongly identified with this image, and thus, a pseudonym was born.

over the years, i have told this story many times, always emphasizing that i am, indeed, one who carries too much metaphorical shit, and so the name suited me. larfs aplenty. decades pass. then one friend took it upon himself to look up "guanophore" in a scientific dictionary, and he informed me that it is another word for "iridocyte," or "a specialized cell in the integument of certain animal species which is filled with iridescent crystals of guanine and a variety of lipophores." in other words, a guanophore is a cell that allows certain critters to have a kind of rainbow coloration, like an oil slick in a mud puddle. so now i don't just carry shit: i enable others to glow, sort of. since my diagnosis of asperger's syndrome, i have come to see this more specifically. i am on the autistic spectrum, and i make rainbows.