Book and Journal of Mattanaw

# Mattanaw the Name

Saturday, August 6th, 2022, at 8:44 PM Alaska Time

The name Mattanaw derives initially from simply taking, phonetically, the sounds of my shortened middle name “Matt” and the end of my last name “Cavanaugh” which is pronounces “Anaw”, to form Mattanaw. It is a portmantau of part of my birthname, which is “Christopher Matthew Cavanaugh” more completely.

There were more reasons than this for persisting in using this name as a social alias, however. The inspirations and motivations for the name are somewhat hidden. There are other occurrences in youth which are related. For example, as a child I became aware of the fish called a “Mackinaw Trout”, and remembered this well. Later, at a time when I became obese, and was more rotund, my father would call me a “Tuna” or a “Fatty Tuna”. This was not excessively bothersome as I had no issue considering myself a fish, since it is humorous. Combiningthese, my alias name, and history with Mackinaw fish and tunas, I later began to think of myself as a Mattanaw Trout.

There may also be some influence in mind, subconsciously, of the name Maginaw, which is a rapper I was aware of as a teen. There was no conscious influence in this, but it could be that this created additional readiness to be satisfied, or self-tolerant with the sound of my social alias.

After creating a social alias of Mattanaw and obtaining domain names, I decided to use the name for all my social media, as a mononym. My name was just Mattanaw wherever there was a social site I considered worth joining.

This was enough to initiate use of the name but more still went into my gradual transition to making it my real name. I preferred to have the mononym as my only name and nothing more; just one word: “Mattanaw”. However, there are many restrictions on naming that must be considered, including the transition period moving from one name to the next. A first and last name is required by software applications that are rigid, and stupidly unaware that mononyms are legalnames. For this purpose, I decided my first and last name would be both “Mattanaw”, or “Mattanaw Mattanaw”. Having history in mathematics and logic, in one way I thought of this as a redundant and idempotent name, which is equivalent to the Mononym, and that additional repetitions of “Mattanaw” would yet still just be “Mattanaw”. I also thought, that it was also Mattanaw2, or “Mattanaw Squared”. Additional “Mattanaw”s added to the end would result in cubic “Mattanaw” and “Mattanaw” to the nth power. This is the sort of fun with the name I enjoyed in considering making it my legal name.

Knowing that there are some good qualities to the name Christopher Matthew Cavanaugh which relate to maybe some expectation of prestige or quality in academcis, and perhaps power, and my view that the name seems a good Author’s name that could appear on books, I did not want to totally eliminate it all at once, or maybe not at all. I was uncertain. But the name was excessively Christian. Having the name Matthew, author of one Jewish Biblical Gospel, and the name “Christ”, for Jesus, in “Christopher”, could not be a worse choice of name. My worldview is not derivative of Christianity or Judaism, and I reject it utterly. To have it as my name is really something quite irritating.

Nevertheless, I had ID cards with the birth name, and credit cards, and various records with that name. My professional life also used the name, and it was on my resumes. There were many historical connections to that name, and many things to change to get off that name. In many contexts, I was not certain I wanted the name Mattanaw, and that issue persists to the present day. I have not totally made the change to Mattanaw with clients, and with my outward presentation of my resumé. However, online my resume has been connected with my website, and again, my social media profiles that people would search used “Mattanaw”.

When I submitted a change of name request with the Court in Anchorage Alaska, I chose to use the full name Mattanaw Christopher Matthew Cavanaugh Mattanaw. This I decided was an excellent choice because it preserved both names, but allowed me to entirely switch my name to mononymous “Mattanaw” because emphasis is on first and last name, which is redundantly the same name, which makes the mononym usable. I also really liked the symmetry of my initials, which were CMC. This allowed me to have the initials MCMCM which also has a symmetry.

Having a long name is an interesting choice in that it allows different combinations, permuations and the like for use where one cannot necessarily choose the whole name anyway.

Mattanaw I., formerly "Christopher Matthew Cavanaugh"

I am a retired executive, software architect, and consultant, with professional/academic experience in the fields of Moral Philosophy and Ethics, Computer Science, Psychology, Philosophy, and more recently, Economics. I am a Pandisciplinarian, and Lifetime Member of the High Intelligence Community.

Articles on this site are eclectic, and draw from content prepared between 1980 and 2024. Topics touch on all of life's categories, and blend them with logical rationality and my own particular system of ethics. The common theme connecting all articles is moral philosophy, even if that is not immediately apparent. Any of my articles that touch on "the good and virtuous life" will be published here. These articles interrelate with my incipient theory of ethics, two decades in preparation. This Book and Journal is the gradual unfolding of that ethic, and my living autobiography, in a collection of individual books that fit into groups of book collections.

This Book and Journal is already one of the largest private websites and writings ever prepared, at nearly 1 million words, greater than 50,000 images and videos, and nearly one terabyte of space utilized. The entire software architecture is of my creation. Issues of the book for sale can be found under featured. These texts are handmade by myself, and are of excellent quality, and constitute the normal issues of my journal that can also be subscribed to. The entire work is a transparent work in progress. Not all is complete, and it will remain in an incomplete state until death.

I welcome and appreciate constructive feedback and conversation with readers. You can reach me at mattanaw@mattanaw.com (site related), cmcavanaugh@g.harvard.edu (academic related), or christopher.matthew.cavanaugh@member.mensa.org (intelligence related), or via the other social media channels listed at the bottom of the site.

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