To some large degree, the titles may have indicated longevity, though they mostly indicated number of posts. Like the poor person who never served and really doesn't know whether a sergeant is higher than a major, a visitor might not immediately know whether it was "better" to be a samurai or a warrior or a member of the Gentry. Let's face it those titles were fairly arbitrary and only MORE OR LESS indicative of prestige...

But after looking a handful of times, one began to realize that there was a hierarchy and the hierarchy usually was worth knowing.

My title for this post refers to the Lido Deck on the Love Boat. You never really did know if it was better or worse than the Promenade deck or the Calypso deck. And my girlfriend didn't know if being a kilted warrior was good or not' or HOW good. I think the reason is fairly clear- they are all supposed to sound good and the actual relative prestige is less important.

On the other hand, let's get serious about "chosen by one person". Our names (our "handles", our idnetities, aour aliases, etc.), unless they were chosen by our parents, were "chosen by one person." If you come to SC and start hunting for MacLowlife, you are going to be hunting for a long time, just as you would be for well over half of the members whose member identities were "chosen by one person". If a guy wishes to designate himself a kilted keeper of the eternal flame, or a kilted prosector, or a kilted konstable, that is not much different from proclaiming to all of the forum that my name is MacLowlife, which it is not actually. It is a form of self-deprecating humor, a means of defusing notions that I take myself too seriously. In case that wasn't already clear.

If one looks at this forum daily, one notices which faces appear regularly and which faces don't. And it doesn't take too long for a member to establish him(or her)self as either a person of goodwill or a person who tends to get huffy- or even as a person who means well, but is frequently misunderstood. A visitor might miss those nuances, but a visitor might miss a lot of things.

I expect, in the time it has taken me to type all of this, that someone else has already said " some of us are more equal than others."