Regarding my apparent misspelling
of the word "fiend."

For almost ten years, people have known me by the name "Slyfeind" on various message boards and mailing lists, or at least through my e-mail and home page. Many times, I've been erroneously corrected as people call me "Sly-fiend." I never gave it a second thought, until my former teachers took notice. Not one to want to let them down, here is the short version of what happened.

When I was eleven years old, I discovered OSI's "Ultima 2" for the Commodore 64. The character I made for that game was an elven thief. I worked through a number of elvish-sounding syllables, lyrical "S's" and "L's" until I strung together the nonsensical word, "Sl-eye-f-eye-nd."

I went through many different spellings of "Sl-eye-f-eye-nd" until I realized there was only one correct way to spell it; Slyfeind. E before I pronounces the long-I sound, as does a Y at the end of a syllable or a word (generally speaking). Sure, it looked like I misspelled "fiend." But nobody would ever see the name except me.

Then, thirteen years later, I discovered Ultima Online. I was still rather fond of the idea of an elven thief, so I ressurected the character of Slyfeind. I set up a Yahoo! e-mail account for my gaming purposes, and naturally called myself such on all the UO message boards.

And here we are today. I don't particularly take it upon myself to correct people on such small matters (unless I'm just kidding around), but I thought maybe just a short explanation would quell the corrections of others, and we can all rest easier at night knowing that I do know what the E before I sounds like.