What Does “Verbosian” Mean?

Curious where the name “Verbosian” came from? Here’s the short version of a long story.

I have a tendency to be a bit verbose and include a lot of detail in my stories and when explaining technical solutions.

In command-line scripts, there’s often a `-v` or `–verbose` flag to enable more detailed output. Years ago, a friend and colleague decided that “Dash V” would be a fitting nickname for me. I’m nothing if not self-deprecating, so when he printed it out, I leaned into it and it hung on the office wall by my desk for years.

When I started thinking about reviving my long-dormant personal blog, I considered some variation of “dash-v” for the name. But I ran into two problems. First, most of the good domain name variants were already taken. Second, the punctuation made things messy: “dash-v” includes both the word dash and a dash character, so it could be read as “dash dash v.” And if you’re being technical, the long-form version of the flag is “dash dash verbose,” not just “-v.” Plus, domain names can’t start with a dash, so trying to use “-v” directly wouldn’t work anyway.

That’s when I landed on a better idea — a portmanteau of verbose and Ian: Verbosian.