I’m Ighnot, pronounced “ig’-not,” and I’ve found this name to be very, very not taken everywhere I go. It’s sheer convenience and habit, really. How it was established is a funny, perhaps boring, story related to my job.

I joined the Air Force years ago, and you have to have a nickname in the military. At the time I joined, Silence of the Lambs was a popular hit movie, and my last name sounds very close to “Lecter,” as in Hannibal Lecter. So for a while there I was Hannibal. Then the movie Hannibal came out. Before then, if I named myself Hannibal in a video game (games are a big thing in my life), it wasn’t normally taken. After Hannibal, that changed.

I mentioned to a co-programmer at work that I had this problem, and we divised Ighnot from an obscure wiring diagram of the inner workings of the AWACS Radar System, on which I was a technician at the time. The signal name was “I get hit,” signifying a target candidate, and it was a “notted,” or inverted, signal as well. “Ighnot” was born.