Two Heads are better than One (or Vice Versa)
All Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy material © Douglas Adams
Prologue
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has much to say on the issue of names. Other sources of information may state intensely documented reasons for why some names are unfortunate, such as having to put one's tongue in rather unconventional positions in order to pronounce a certain vowel, but the Guide merely states a brief introduction and then purges on into a long list of truly laughable names.
One of the most unfortunate names in the known Galaxy is that of Hezzlegoozen Sloink Gipwik, which has its own highly ludicrous meaning in the original tongue. Unfortunately, this meaning has been forever lost to history, due to the fact that whenever someone had asked why the name Hezzlegoozen Sloink Gipwik was so outrageous, the natives to the language would laugh so hard they couldn't give a decent reply. It was such an atrocious name that no one could stop laughing long enough after thinking about it to repeat the meaning to any of the next generation, nor write the meaning in history books, or even manage to encode the meaning into the brains of abnormally sized fruit flies. Because no one ever spoke the meaning, it eventually became unknown, but the name Hezzlegoozen Sloink Gipwik still remained completely unfortunate.
Almost as unfortunate as the name Slartibartfast.
It is one of the many quirks in life that people with outrageous names aren't usually outrageous people themselves. Slartibartfast was, in fact, a simple planetary constructor who enjoyed sculpting luxurious fjords and occasionally going out to themed restaurants for a quick breakfast or pre-brunch date. A man whose nickname had once been Ix (Ix meaning boy who cannot successfully state what a Hrung is, nor why it chose to collapse on Betelgeuse 7) was merely a field researcher for the Guide and saved the universe only on rare occasions; he much rather preferred finding a good bar or not being stranded on highly primitive planets.
It should be stated the name Ix is no longer in the Guide's list of highly unfortunate names. This was due to a typographical error of one of the female editors of the Encyclopedia Galactica. The details of the accident are very obscure, but seeing that they involve champagne, a single father, and a Very Red Transportatio-Vroom, the results are quite inevitable. Ix was soon known to mean boy who has such a remarkably hoopy dad that the universe simply isn't froody enough to hold his ultimate coolness. This change in meaning wasn't widely publicized, but it was enough of a change to make Zaphod Beeblebrox eagerly name his son after his previously unfortunately nicknamed semi-cousin.
It should also be stated that while some people with extraordinary names may turn out entirely ordinary, Hezzlegoozen Sloink Gipwik wasn't one of those people. He was a man of great aptitude and outstanding intellectual ability. Many people had doubted his true genius due to his parents' unfortunate nasal conditions when telling the Nurse-Bot 3300 the name of their newborn son. (They had both caught the Hepplewip cold, a very nasty condition that slurs speech and causes mucus-like substances to spew from the oral cavities of the infected creatures. The Nurse-Bot could hear what poor Hezzlegoozen's parents had originally wanted to name him despite their battered speech. (It was Henry.) It just didn't take kindly to having mucus-like substances sprayed over its newly polished metal exterior, and had decided it wasn't above a little revenge. The robot soon found it had rather enjoyed writing out the wrong names on birth certificates, and was only stopped after it had unperturbedly named a government official's child Belgium. )
The unfortunately named Hezzlegoozen Sloink Gipwik was a great thinker, and loved storing things and ideas away to be categorized and filed. Because of his name, however, only the most repulsive beings in the galaxy would hire him for any sort of jobs.
Hezzlegoozen did not enjoy working for the Vogons.
But he did enjoy whiling away in his spare time, working on some sort of storage contraption or another……