Name: MaFt Morley
Age: 43 *
Home Town: Bradford
Hobbies: Music, films, computers, web design, gadgets, blogging

What's In A Name?

'MaFt'. It's not an every day name. I've been asked many times about it's origin, my parent's origin, my country of birth, the meaning of this unusual name and why it has two capital letters. The fact is, it's just a name. It's my name albeit not quite the one I was given at birth. My real name is Matthew, it's a Biblical name meaning "God's Gift" - realisitically though, I was my Dad's surprise gift to my Mum... Ahem, enough of that, no one likes to think about their parents in that way... Eugh!

Even though my parents gave me the name, I have no recollection of ever being called Matthew during peaceful times. It was always Maff, Matthew was only ever used when I was in trouble. If it was more serious I'd get my middle name too. I hated, and still hate, Maffy. Even worse is Maffy-Waffy.

So, the years passed and I headed to Lancaster University where I decided that Maff sounded too babyish. So I opted to tell people I was called Matt as it sounded more grown-up. And, hey, I was eighteen, I was super grown-up; I could (finally) drink beer (legally)! That name stuck for, ooh, probably about a month until new friends started coming to my home in Bradford or Mrs-MaFt-to-be came to visit and they would hear me being called Maff.

You can probably now guess what happened, if not then I shall explain. The two names, Maff and Matt, became merged into one and 'Maft' was officially born.

The capital F came later, I think it was in late 2000 when the first known printed record of MaFt was created. It is on one of the Film Society's Programme's that I designed as part of my role as Publicity Officer - I'll try dig it out both as evidence and to assure myself I'm not mental! I remember it was 'popular' at the time to write things with MixEd up CaPiTaliSatiOn. No idea why, but it was... So I just joined in and MaFt has stuck since then.

There you have it; I've been MaFt for nearly two decades now, more than half of my life. It's not that interesting really, is it?!

 

Other MaFt's

It may be difficult to believe but there are other MaFt's - albeit not people...:

Mobile Aircraft Fire Trainer - a big lump of fuselage regularly set on fire at airports to train the firemen
Museum of America's Freedom Trains - a really dull sounding museum
Marriage And Family Therapy - we all need a little therapy at times...
MAF Translator - some car thingy-ma-bob, tunes your engine or something
Multiple Affinity Purification Tag - a tag for identifying certain proteins
Months After First Treatment - a unit of measure for, erm, measuring things
Maft al Kabir & Maft as Sahgir - two places in Iraq
Multicomputer Architecture for Fault Tolerance - a distributed system designed to provide extremely reliable computation in real-time control systems

 

*I hope you realise I actually wrote a PHP script to show my age in the bit above... You know, in case I forget to change it when my birthday comes around!

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