Once upon a time, at Carnegie Mellon University, people were assigned their usernames automatically when they affiliated with the school.

The usernames took the form:

[first initial] [last initial] [alphanumeric] [alphanumeric]

The first person with a given first/last initial pair had 00 for their last two characters, then 01 and so on, using letters once the digits were exhausted.

When he was admitted to CMU in 1991, your host was assigned the username sk4p.

Now lots of people had a 0 or 1 for their third character, because they were among the first of their initials, and this made some user IDs sorta pronounceable: fl0m and fl0p, for example, were two people your host knew personally.

And then we come to sk4p. Now in L33T this is pronounced “skap”, which ambifortunately doesn’t mean anything in English.

But L33T wasn’t so popular back in 1991, and so most people just ignored the “4″ and pronounced it “skip” or “skippy”. Our hero wasn’t terribly fond of this.

As a counter-proposal, he suggested pronouncing the “4″, creating the rather Nordic-sounding “sk-four-p” or “skvorp”. And that doesn’t mean anything in Icelandic.  (That I know of.)