My name is Lauren Leach-Steffens; the Steffens got added when I got married. With a last name like “Leach”, it is only natural that one gets the nickname “Leachie”. This nickname annoyed me all throughout grade school, but I eventually accepted it.
The picture, by the way, is of Leach’s giant gecko (the gecko is not related to me.)So tha The nickname for it is the Leachie gecko. See how natural that is?
Then, in college, I became a denizen of the interactive computer habitat PLATO. PLATO was an educational system, but in addition to lessons, it had chats (called TERM-talk), topical threads (known as notesfiles), and email (called PNotes) — it was a lot like the Internet, only it had been around since the mid-70s. We had signons (what you’d call usernames, but they doubled as email addresses. Mine was lleach@pasrf (as in friend of a PASR programmer).
With a username of lleach, it was only natural to turn it into lleachie.
The name is pronounced in the typical English way: just like ‘leachie’, but spelled with two Ls. In Spanish, I guess it’s pronounced ‘yeachie’. A Polish friend of mine pronounces it ‘ell-ee-otch-ee’. I can’t say that’s wrong.
So that’s it. I have never run into a lleachie on the Internet who wasn’t me.
Words Like Me 