A number of people have asked me about tarn.org. Here is a quick explanation.
When I first decided I needed a domain name (mainly to ensure permanent e-mail addressing at the time), in 1996, I looked around for something that would be short, memorable, easy to spell, and not particularly culturally-specific. Separately, I was using the online name “innominate”: like Odysseus, I appreciated the paradox of a moniker that means “nameless”. (I also liked the legal link to the innominate torts.) One of the most well-known small lakes in the English Lake District is Innominate Tarn, so it was a short step from the online name to the domain name.
Strictly speaking, Innominate Tarn is not actually a tarn. Geographically, a tarn is a lake formed in a glacial bowl, or cirque. However, the word is used more liberally than the geographers might like.
According to Wikipedia, there are some other tarns too:
Tarn may refer to:
- Geography and places
HMS Tarn (P336), a Second World War British T class submarine
- Tarn (lake), a mountain lake or pool formed in a cirque excavated by a glacier
- Tarn, France, a département in southwest France
- Tarn River, a river in France
- Tarn oil field, an oil field in Alaska
- Tarn, the local name for Barnsley
- Mount Tarn, summit on the southern part of the Strait of Magellan.
- People
- William Woodthorpe Tarn, a 20th century British historian and author.
- John Tarn, a surgeon who served the Royal Navy on the HMS Adventure.
- Nathaniel Tarn, a British-American poet
- Maria Dyer (nee Tarn), a British Protestant Christian missionary to the Chinese
- Other
- Tarn, a giant bird of prey sometimes used as a riding animal in the Gor science fiction series
- TARN, TArget Redemption Note, a type of structured-note (Financial Derivative)
The word “tarn” is also used several time in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of User,” for example:
“Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn.”