User: Phthoggos

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Leigh Walton. Sophomore, Reed College, Portland, Oregon. Email LW at reed dot edu.

Hey, it's a picture of me!

Things I can/should/do work on

What else? I've done editing work on a fairly wide variety of topics, though nothing terribly large-scale (yet). I suppose I have the most to offer on the following topics:

• Heavy metal music of all kinds. It's tough to find serious-minded writing on metal anywhere on the web, and I like to think I have some insights. The problem I'm struggling with, I suppose, is that Wikipedia is a secondary source, not a primary one, and I don't know exactly what sort of commentary is acceptable. No original research, yes, but also "articles about art works are supposed to be encyclopedia articles. But of course critical analysis of art is welcome, if grounded in direct observations." [1]. A few of the things I put in Nu metal#Guitar, for example, aren't statements that I've ever seen or heard before, just observations that I've made, drawing connections and reasoning things out in my head. How can one write an encyclopedia article about recent art without incorporating some amount of original thought?
• Reed College
• Comic books. As soon-to-be-co-signator of the Reed MLLL or Comic Book Library, I have access to thousands upon thousands of comics from the last four decades. Plus I grew up reading comics. Ideally I'd like to do some analysis in this field too, but again I run into the same problem.
  • To-do: Counter-X, Revolution (comics), John Totleben, Walt Simonson, and other Marvel creators.
    • Especially to work with a Wikipedia:WikiProject to organize comics, comic book, sequential art, American comic book, &c. underground comics and alternative comics are different articles? WTF?
      • Started WikiProject on Comics. "Invited": ike9898, Theanthrope, Lvr, lowellian, mk, BTfromLA, (unfortunately, mhr seems to have left us), modemac, Dodger...
• More things as they occur to me. I'm a classics major, but I doubt I'm likely to run across much that I feel competent to edit.

Me elsewhere

I have a livejournal here: [2].

Why "Phthoggos"?

...because it's a transliteration of φθόγγος, which was as close as I got in my high school Greek class to my "Greek name." It's also my favorite Greek word, for many reasons:

• It's representative of the orthographic convention "γγ = ng = /ŋg/", which I think is funny/cute.
• It's the source of the English words "diphthong," "triphthong," and so on, which I always thought were funny when I pronounced it "dip-thong," mostly because of the "thong" part, although I say "diffthong" now that I'm aware of its etymology.
• It means, variously, "human voice," "sound," "musical note," or "speech." I like those things.
• It's fun to say, both in the lazy pronunciation /fθɔ'ŋ:gɔs:/ and the more strict (and more fun!) /pʰtʰɔ'ŋ:gɔs:/ (vowel quality is up for debate). PTONG-OSS!
• It tends to get mispronounced "fthogg-oss"/"fthogg-ose," which is somewhat amusing, and I like the association that some have developed with the term Shoggoth, or perhaps Dr. Strange's (or should I say Stan Lee's) "By the Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth!"
  • This is mostly due to my unconventional transliteration of "γγ" as "gg," but I persist.