My name is….

When I was 14 years old one of my close aunt’s married a man from Israel. The guy was born and raised there and spoke fluent Hebrew.

The Hebrew language has a alphabet all of its own. Not only is it unique in its own way, but its read backwards compared to English.

I would find books, CD’s, and movies around their house and it seemed both odd and fascinating the way everything was composed backwards. The back cover of an English book would be the front cover of the same Hebrew book. Over the years he taught me some of the language, primarily swear words, which nearly all of it has left me.

One of the things he taught me was how to write my name. Seeing my name is Adam, which everyone is familiar with the story of Adam and Eve, I had a rather common name in the Hebrew language. The true origin of my name is from the Hebrew language.

In the Hebrew language they rarely use vowels. My name in English has two letter A’s. In the Hebrew language the middle A is removed so the name is only spelled with three letters. A-D-M

Being young and fascinated with the newly found spelling of my name, I quickly convinced myself that it should be spelled that way. Wanting to do everything possible at that age to set myself apart from everyone else and be different I, on my own accord, changed my name.

Once I got older the thought of legally changing the spelling of my name lost interest however, to this day I still continue to do it.

The name Adium, is actually derived from this new found spelling of my first name. Spelling my name A-D-M is about how you pronounce Adium. Seeing I wanted everyone to know how I spell my name and be as unique and as different as possible, Adium became the name I used online and for e-mail.

It’s been so long since I first started using the name Adium so I can’t exactly remember how or even why I invented it. I do remember it just popped in my head and I grew to admire it.

In high school (Early to mid-1990′s) I started learning how to create web pages. Registering a domain name was a minimum of $80 for two years. The name adium.com was available and I was set on purchasing it. Thinking my name was unique and that no one else on the web had even heard it I held off. Towards the end of high school (1997) someone had registered that domain.

Since then I have seen the name Adium in various places around the net. There is a chat client for the Mac, several Asian internet users have adopted the name (mainly Chinese). It’s lost a small portion of its uniqueness. However with the exception of adium.com, chances are if you find someone online using the name Adium, 99.9% of the time it will be me.