Tag: random

Someone asked me this so I shall answer: what’s with “quollism”?

I wanted a short-ish unique handle which wasn’t based on my real name. Something I could reasonably expect to get as a username for any Internet service which requires one, and a little piece of lexical real estate nobody else already has claim to. And no copping out putting numbers at the end of something like a noob.

I was on a patriotic zoological tip at the time. “Quoll” appealed because it is only five letters long. (Phascogale and antechinus did not appeal.) Quolls are a genus of white-spotted cat-sized predatory marsupial found in Australia and New Guinea. You can see a yawning chuditch (western quoll) in this ident. (Which is a work in progress. Obviously.) Though as quoll pictures go, this one is my current favourite.

Sadly, all four species of Australian quoll have lost big chunks of their range since European settlement in Australia because of habitat loss, introduced predators and changed fire regimes. They all remain vulnerable to extinction (if they’re lucky), not to mention as Australian animals go they’re almost unknown (an even greater problem). Spreading the word on them felt right.

But “quoll” by itself wasn’t guaranteed to be unique. So I put it into an online word generator which helpfully added -ism to the end. I had my short Internet-unique handle. Hurrah!

(Although if Quollism was some sort of tenet, it would be Everything needs more quolls.)

So that’s what’s with “quollism”.