I'm Bob Lee on epic and in real life, Meadow Skipper on TGR, televisionary on earnyourturns, and...sometimes amlaq.
There's a story about that name amlaq. I fought wildfire all over for many years, and I was stationed in Alaska for a long time. This one time I was in a remote Yupik Eskimo village - Aniak - that was surrounded by wildfires. I was running a staging area that transferred firefighters and supplies from airplanes to helicopters and shuttled them out to the fires. I'd hired a number of the local Yupiks to help out and one woman I'd hired gave me the nickname of Umlaq, which essentially meant mustache.
I was kind of proud of that, and so one day when a number of villagers had wandered out to the airstrip and were standing around in a group to watch the excitement, that woman introduced me as Bob. I told the locals "yeah, but you can call me Amlaq (see how I changed it a little). Now Yupik Eskimos are a very polite and somewhat quiet people, and when I said Amlaq they got real quiet and started flashing looks at each other, then they started softly chuckling, then giggling, and finally laughing out loud and looking away from me.
I was confused and looked at the woman who'd nicknamed me, who was laughing so hard she had tears in her eyes, and asked what the hell? It took her a while to calm down, but finally she told me "You have to be careful how you pronounce your words. Umlaq means the hair that grows from your lip. Amlaq is the word for the hair that grows between your legs." I'd just told the people of Aniak to call me pubic hair.
