Where is “Roughinamorato” from?

My mother did not name me Roughinamorato.

When I first discovered the kink community, in the days before FetLife, I fell in with a bunch of people who coordinated their kink lives through LiveJournal. They used it as a place for community and social coordination, and to participate in that I needed to create an LJ account. I needed to think of a screen name.

I wanted to combine something about primal lust, and something about tenderness. I figured Italian sounded romantic, so I looked up what “lover” was in Italian (thank you, online automated translators); I found “inamorato” for “a male lover.” Ultimately I settled on “rough lover,” or “rough inamorato.”

It turns out that’s spelled wrong: it should properly be spelled “innamorato,” with a double n. If I wanted to be correct, I would have done “roughinnamorato.” But I didn’t find that out until much later, when I had already been using the account for a while, and hey, what difference did it make? It was just an online account.

Then I got a gmail account (to separate my kink explorations from the rest of my life), and to be consistent, I picked “roughinamorato” at gmail. But that was OK, because it was really just there for the dozen or so people I knew in this new kink world.

Some years later, FetLife came around, and everyone in our group started getting accounts on FetLife, so naturally, to make things simple, I grabbed “roughinamorato” on FetLife too. And then I started acquiring friends on FetLife. And the number of people who’d seen the name grew. Then I started using Roughinamorato in the scene when I presented, to protect my privacy in my business life. The misspelling was now officially entrenched.

So now I use Roughinamorato for my scene name and presenter/educator/whatever world, and people call me Rough’, and there it is. When I began using it I never intended to use it in actual speech; honestly, it’s kind of awkward to say. Does not fall trippingly from the tongue. It’s a mouthful, actually. Requires extra diction.

The hardest part is probably being introduced to people who’ve never seen the word spelled out; they have no reference, and usually just think they’re hearing “Ralph.” I usually let them – if it becomes important it’s easy enough to fix later.